


The Impossible History of Annalise Doyle

by Milady1218



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Harry Potter Next Generation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-01-19 16:42:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 58,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1476787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milady1218/pseuds/Milady1218
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between being conspicuously different from her adoptive parents and sister in both looks and disposition, having no idea who her biological family was or how to find out, and her Ravenclaw classmates all insisting that she should have been sorted into a different House, Annalise Doyle has never not felt a little out of place. The fact that she managed to make an enemy of Harry Potter's obnoxious son during the very first week of her first year hasn't helped.</p><p>Steven Edwards, on the other hand, has life pretty much figured out. Be leveraging his resemblance to Scorpius Malfoy, he's managed to rise above his middle-class upbringing to the top of the Slytherin social ladder. The only thing he needs now is for Scorpius' father to come clean and admit that Steven is his son.</p><p>When the two of them are kidnapped by Scorpius' grandmother in the spring of their fourth year, they are promised answers to their questions of identity, but they soon discover that the simplest versions of the truth aren't always simple.<br/>Or, for that matter, true.</p><p>TL;DR: cool kid and weird girl bicker a lot and try to make sense of a series of bizarre coincidences to figure out stuff about their families</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Which I am Kidnapped in the Nicest Way Possible

**Author's Note:**

> Just in case the tags weren't clear, there is little to no romantic action in this story. So sorry to disappoint.

Not many people leave Hogwarts over the Easter Holidays, but each year nearly every student knows at least one or two people who are going somewhere for some reason or another. This means that, on the day that the people who are going to leave do so, practically the whole population of the school treks over to the Hogsmeade train station like a bunch of lemmings to see their friends off. Usually I am not among those who go; I really only have one friend and she doesn’t usually leave for Easter either. However, I went the spring of my fourth year, because Charlie and her family were going to visit with her older brother, who was planning to ask his girlfriend to marry him. And, since I had nothing better to do with my afternoon, I decided to accompany her to the train.

  
To be perfectly honest, I was absolutely dreading her departure. It meant, for me, one lonely and tedious week at school without my best friend to keep me company – only a load of pointless homework assignments to work on. I was also rather jealous that I had nowhere interesting to go or to do. Oh, I’d find ways to amuse myself in between study sessions, but would I have any grand adventures or memorable things to tell Charlie about when she returned? Probably not. It’s rather difficult to have adventures by oneself, and I didn’t know anyone but Charlie who’d be willing to have one with me. For reasons entirely outside my control, everyone else at Hogwarts thinks I’m weird.

  
Of course, I didn’t dare mention anything about how I felt as we walked together to the station. I may not be especially tactful or even remotely civil half of the time, but I try to be around Charlotte Lupin. Funny, the things we do for our close friends and no one else. I let her chat the whole way about her brother’s proposal plans while I pretended to care. “Vic’s really into romantic stuff, and since her parents live by the sea, Teddy wants to have a candlelight dinner and a walk on the beach. He’ll take her up to the point, by the rocks, and then whip out the ring and ask her,” she said excitedly, as if it was her engagement rather than Teddy’s. “And while they’re out, I, her parents, my parents, and everybody else will set out fancy desserts and rose petals at the spot they had dinner.”

  
“She should like that.” I said blandly. I knew Teddy reasonably well, since I’d been friends with Charlie for over ten years, but I’d only met Victoire once. She was pretty, with a rather predictably girlie disposition, exactly the type of girl who’d be blown away by a romantic beach proposal. Then again, beaches are more or less universally appealing.

  
Charlie nodded. “Teddy told me she specifically told him once – a long time ago, before they were even officially dating – that that’s how she ideally wanted to be proposed to.”

  
After a short pause, I decided to ask Charlie a rather awkward question. “So, are you and Ellie (her older sister)...happy that your brother wants to marry Vic?” He never struck me as the type to go for such a conventional girl – he has blue hair, after all. I only hope that when Charlie gets married, it’ll be to a man who actually has a personality.

  
“Of course I’m happy,” Charlie said, as if she had never even considered being unhappy that her brother had fallen in love with a ditzy blonde Weasley. I know I’d be disappointed if I were her. “I think it’s great that Teddy’s found a girl he wants to spend the rest of his life with. Why wouldn’t I be happy?”

  
“I don’t know. Maybe because you don’t think Teddy and Vic are quite right for each other? Maybe Vic strikes you as really boring and you think Teddy deserves someone a little more interesting to spend his life with?” I suggested.

  
“Anna, it isn’t your job to decide who is and isn’t ‘right’ for my brother,” Charlie admonished me. “You don’t even really know Vic anyway. How can you say she’s boring?”  
I shrugged. “I can just tell these sorts of things. It’s kind of a talent of mine.”

  
“What, making snap judgments about people so you can come up with dumb excuses not to like them?” asked Charlie exasperatedly. She’s very amusing when she gets cross. Her hair, usually bright pink, goes an interesting reddish color and she makes this terrific little pouty face.

  
“Well, when you put it that way – yes. That’s essentially it. And it’s useful, too, considering how many idiots there are in the world.” For example, James Potter and all of the people he’s convinced that I’m certifiably insane (which I actually might be, but that’s beside the point), which is the vast majority of my classmates. They avoid making eye contact with me in the hallways and never talk to me if they can help it and talk about me behind my back, but since I never liked them anyway I try not to be bothered by their petty actions. “You should really try it sometime.”

  
Charlie shook her head, looking a combination of disappointed and entertained by my obstinacy, like my mother when she tells me to help with supper and I burn, mangle, or otherwise completely destroy whatever dish I have been asked to assist in preparing (another peculiar talent of mine, but I feel a little better knowing that Charlie’s mum is as bad if not worse at cooking than I am). “You, Anna, are completely impossible,” she said, laughing a little. We were drawing close to the platform by that point in the conversation; lots of people were boarding the train or help their friends get their luggage up into the cars not too far from us. As usual, as soon as anyone spotted me, they grimaced and looked away. Some of them glanced at Charlie like they were sorry she was stuck with a nutter like me for a friend. Luckily, a gap soon opened up in the crowd, just big enough for Charlie and her suitcase to slip through. “You probably should get going now.” I said.

  
“Probably.” People were steadily dispersing; the train would be leaving shortly whether Charlie was aboard or not. I wondered briefly if it would be at all possible to stall her so she’d miss it. Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to find out; an announcement went out that there were only two minutes till departure, prompting Charlie to quickly say, “Bye, Anna! See you next week!” and then start off towards the train. After she had gone several yards, she turned part of the way around and added, “Don’t have too much fun while I’m gone, okay?”

  
That wasn’t something I was worried about at all, considering that I was already serving detention for the last bit of “fun” I’d had without Charlie. Basically, what happened is this: while researching a paper for History of Magic, I came across a schematic in a book for a flaming trebuchet. I thought it would be fun to build a small one and shoot it at James, and I ended up setting a second-year on fire. It wasn’t quite as bad as it sounds; there wasn’t any permanent tissue damage. “I won’t if you won’t!” I promised. “Or if you mail me some cake!”

“Forget it, then!” Charlie shouted back, grinning.

  
Once on the train, she snagged a window seat and waved a final good-bye to me as she left the station. I waved back, feeling for whatever reason a little bit ridiculous for doing so, and then began my journey back towards the school. As I wasn’t particularly eager to get back, I went as slowly as humanly possible, ignoring snickers from a few passerby on account of the fact that someone had stolen my leave-in conditioner as a prank and it was rather damp out so my hair was insanely frizzy. As I walked I contemplated what I was going to do with myself for the rest of the afternoon and evening. My first thought was this: build a small guillotine and somehow get James to stick his hand in it, but then I remembered that he was one of those students who’d gone home on holiday. Plus, had no way of acquiring a guillotine blade (or any sort of blade), so I supposed I’d have to work on homework instead. Darn.

  
By the time I got about halfway to the Hogwarts gatehouse, I was practically the only person still on the path, and the few others I could see were pretty far ahead of me. So I was extremely surprised when I heard a voice pipe up from directly behind me. “Hello.”

  
Turning around, I saw an older woman – in her sixties or thereabouts – wearing an old-fashioned but nicely tailored wool coat, standing in the middle of the path, anxiously fingering a pair of gloves. Her blonde hair (dyed, in all likelihood; there was a suspicious shortage of grey strands) had been carefully put up in some sort of fancy twist, but a few choice wisps had come undone around her face, framing the expression of astonished joy on her face, apparently brought on by spotting me. Considering that I had absolutely no idea who she was, the way she looked at me was rather disconcerting. I turned back towards the school, away from her, and continued walking. “Goodbye.”

  
“No no no, wait!” the woman said, coming up alongside me. She looked absolutely desperate to speak to me for some reason, although she was still smiling like a ninny.

  
“What?” I snapped.

  
The woman said nothing at first, but instead reached out and grabbed my hand. Tightly, as if she were hanging on to me for dear life. “Please don’t go,” she said. The intensity of her sentiment was so much that it was actually really disturbing, but I didn’t let that show. I wasn’t about to look scared of a weird old lady. “You can’t go.”

  
“Yes, I can,” I informed her coolly, wrenching my hand out of her grasp and continuing towards the castle at a much faster clip than before, wondering who I should tell that I had been accosted by a strange woman just off of school grounds. Something told me that people might have a bit of trouble believing my story, though, seeing as I’m not particularly renowned for honesty and there were no other witnesses. “I’m going. Goodbye. If you have a problem with that, get over it or get therapy, lady.”

  
Fixing me with a determined look that was, if anything, more disconcerting than her previous desperate elation, the woman said, calmly, “As a matter of fact, I do have a problem with that, Annalise.” She gave a little sigh before coming after me. “You know, I had quite hoped this would be easier…I really don’t know what I was thinking. You never make things very easy. I am so sorry, but I have to do this.” I barely had time to wonder how she knew my name before she seized my hand and Apparated me away.

  
A split second later, we arrived in the front hall of what was either a museum or a very old, fancy mansion. My guess was that it was the latter, which meant that my kidnapper was an old-money pureblood, which meant that I probably wasn’t going to be held for ransom. As for the real reason I had been kidnapped – well, I didn’t stop to consider that for a few minutes, because I was too busy flipping out. “What the – what did you just do? You kidnapped me, and in broad daylight, too! Who even does that? Honestly! Who are you, anyway? What is this place? Where have you taken me?” I demanded, brandishing my wand in my kidnapper’s face. “Wherever it is, I demand that you return me to Hogwarts at once! My friend’s mother is an Auror, and the instant I get the chance I’m going to write and tell her what you’ve done! You’re going to seriously regret having kidnapped me, I swear it! Really, what kind of sick person –“

  
“Calm down, won’t you, Anna?” my next-door neighbor, Steven Edwards, said evenly, cutting me off and forcing my arm down. “Quit overreacting. Put the wand away. This is just a little surprise holiday trip, is all. Welcome to Malfoy Manor.” Well. That explained the upscale décor. And Stevie’s presence, considering that he’s believed to be Scorpius Malfoy’s long-lost brother (the two of them do look scarily alike: tall, grey-eyed and platinum-haired – a little difficult to tell apart at a glance). As I got a better look around me, I saw that Scorpius was present as well, standing well back and looking rather uneasy.

  
“Wait a second – you knew about this?” I asked, still a bit hysterical.

  
Stevie’s face colored a little. “Well, not…not exactly. No. I actually had no idea. Neither did Scorpius. It was all Narcissa’s doing (here he gestured at the woman who’d kidnapped me, who was at me moment hanging her coat up and beaming adoringly at him, which was, again, rather freaky). She wanted her grandson home for Easter so she just sort of…picked him up in Hogsmeade without telling anyone, and I – and apparently you as well, for some reason – got to come along. I’m choosing to look at this as an unexpected retreat. I had no plans for the holiday, anyway.”

  
The composure with which he said all that only made me more irritated; I screamed at him, “Picked up without telling anyone? Unexpected retreat? Really? That’s all just a fancy way of saying you were kidnapped too, you numbskull! And since when were you on a first-name basis with Scorpius’ grandmum?”

  
“Since around Christmas,” said Stevie with a shrug. “It’s an interesting story. See, I told my parents I was staying at school, but actually I –“

  
“Steven, perhaps you should save the long explanation until after Annalise is a little more settled in, don’t you think?” Mrs. Malfoy interrupted, saving me from what was sure to be an overdramatized and excessively convoluted tale of how he’d attempted to spend Christmas with his brother. I’d already heard part of that story anyhow. Just not the part where he found it all right to start calling Scorpius’ – and also his, if they really were brothers – grandmother by her first name. “How about Scorpius, you show Annalise around a little. Just so you know, I’m putting her in the green room on the third floor, the one overlooking the back garden. Steven, you’ll be in the room next to Scorpius’. Oh, and while your, um, brother is off giving the tour, may I have a word with you in the dining room? Thank you.” She said, without giving Steven a chance to answer the question.

  
The boys both nodded, but Scorpius apparently felt the need to get some extra clarification on what was going on. “So, do Mum and Dad know you were going to bring me home?”

  
Mrs. Malfoy shook her head. “No. But I’m sure your father will be happy to see you!” she said brightly. “Your mother, I believe, is away visiting with your aunt Daphne. I don’t know when she’s due back.”

  
“I don’t think Dad will be at all happy about Steven and Annalise,” Scorpius pointed out.

  
“He probably won’t be,” his grandmother admitted, rather sheepishly. “Hopefully he won’t put up too much fuss about it, though. And they’ll be good houseguests, I’m sure.” That last bit was spoken rather pointedly at me, as if she knew that I’m rather bad at being courteous. I also tend to set things on fire (mainly at Charlie’s house, but that might only be because I don’t visit many other people). “I’ll take care of the explanations, dear. You just…go show Annalise the rest of the house. And do try not to let her out of your sight or she’ll try to run off,” she added in a whisper, which I don’t believe I was supposed to hear.

  
“Um, okay,” Scorpius said, sounding confused as his grandmother started towards the dining room with Steven trailing behind her, looking a bit anxious about what she might want to say to him. Scorpius then turned to me and said, with somewhat contrived enthusiasm, “Come on, Annalise. Would you like to see inside first, or around the gardens?”

  
“I’d like to see myself back to school, if it’s all the same to you,” I snapped. It would be extremely difficult for me to get back to Hogwarts on my own – there are too many protective spells up on the grounds that prevent unauthorized transportation. I was stuck with the Malfoys until they returned me or until someone learned of the kidnapping and came to investigate. Unless, of course, I could get off the manor grounds and find someone else to return me, but I couldn’t very well try that if Scorpius wouldn’t let me alone.

  
Scorpius gave me a sympathetic smile that indicated what I already suspected: he wasn’t particularly thrilled to have been brought home without warning either, but he was not about to express that opinion in front of his grandmother because he didn’t want to offend her. “Why don’t we start in here?” he suggested. “Then I’ll show you where you’ll be staying for the next…however long we’re going to be here.” So he didn’t know how long his grandmother planned on keeping us either. Brilliant. I dearly hoped it would only be a day or so; spending the whole holiday with only Stevie and Scorpius and the rest of the Malfoys as company might just drive me out of my mind.

As it was no use resisting, I figured that I might as well play along. After all, there had to be a reason why I had been kidnapped along with the boys; I could use being shown the house as an opportunity to try and figure it out. Perhaps, considering that the Malfoys were known to have been heavily involved with the Death Eaters and most circumstantial evidence (frankly, it was all circumstantial; in six months of searching, I’d never encountered one shred of concrete information about where I’d come from) suggested that my birth parents had also had ties to that group, I’d stumble across some clues in that matter as well. Suddenly I was almost eager to explore the manor a little, though not so thrilled that I had to do it with Scorpius by my side. Not that I didn’t like him. I did, or at least I didn’t dislike him. Unlike his brother, he’s one of the few Slytherins who doesn’t have a habit of publicly mocking me. I simply didn’t relish the idea that he had been instructed by his weird grandmother to make sure I didn’t try to escape (which, when I thought about it a second time, could only mean that a successful escape was possible, which meant that I was going to attempt it as soon as the boys or anyone else started getting on my nerves, possibly sooner if I had a good opportunity).

  
“All right, let’s get on with it already,” I said, placing my jacket on the antique coatrack by the front door (where, I might add, it looked extremely out of place), and trying to retain the appearance of being totally apathetic so as not to prompt questions about my abrupt readiness to accept the terms of my “unexpected retreat,” as Stevie so stupidly insisted on calling it. “Lead the way.”

  
Because Malfoy Manor is so large, I was only shown the “highlights,” which pretty much meant we went through the most-used and most noteworthy rooms, the ones least helpful to my search for escape routes and hints as to why I might have been brought along with the boys, and at a pretty good clip too so I didn’t get much of a chance to poke around. Pretty spaces, all, but so typical, so exactly what one would expect of them, that I honestly felt like I’d seen them all before. I’d have given almost anything for a peek inside some of the rooms we skipped over; I had a feeling that those were the ones that held all the really interesting stuff (I later found out that Scorpius was just as curious as I was; he wasn’t allowed in most of those rooms either).

  
Despite the predictability of the rooms, I enjoyed the tour. Scorpius proved an excellent guide, in that he seemed to delight in pointing out and poking fun at every scrap of his family’s sordid history that we came across, even as the wall portraits of long-dead and extremely stuffy Malfoy ancestors berated him for being disrespectful. For example: pointing out the family crest inscribed in the drawing room, he informed me, “the family motto, apparently, is something along the lines of ‘purity will conquer,’ but my mum always jokes that it should be ‘hot blond death.’ I think that fits, don’t you?” He was entirely right. Every single portrait in the room featured a nominally attractive fair-haired man or woman who looked as if they could order someone they didn’t very much like disposed of without a second thought. I laughed, and so did Scorpius, the painting of his great-great-grandfather gave us both dirty looks and told him he was impertinent, and we moved on to the library.

  
One rather odd thing I noticed while Scorpius was showing me around was the way the portraits acted around me. I had fully expected them to deride me a little, seeing as my adoptive family isn’t wealthy by any means and it showed since I was wearing a rather ugly beige-colored sweater (courtesy of my aunt Susan, who thinks she’s better at knitting than she is) with plain jeans and sneakers. And they did do that, some of them. But most of them just made cryptic comments mainly unrelated to my outfit, which I had chosen because it was moderately warm and comfortable for walking and besides most of my favorite tops were in the laundry: “Perhaps I’m mistaken, but doesn’t that young lady looks somewhat like…” began one old man with a large moustache and extremely furry hat, only to be cut off by his wife next to him.

  
“Not just somewhat, Nicholas – immensely,” she said. “Aside from the clothes, that is. The things young people wear these days!”

  
“The resemblance is simply uncanny,” commented another woman. “I wonder who she is.”

  
Nicholas’ portrait looked at me critically. “She can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen years old, so I’m going to guess she’s the great-niece.” He didn’t say who of, as all of the other portraits in the corridor seemed to be able to infer that detail, which really disappointed me. I had been interested to hear the name of someone to whom I was likely related by blood, so from that point on I kept my ears open to see if any other portraits would let anything slip when they murmured to each other about how closely I resembled whoever it was. I’m sure some of them actually did, except they all had a habit of talking over each other; a lot of what they said was indecipherable.

  
Part of the problem was that virtually none of the portraits talked directly to me; all of their chatter about me was amongst themselves. I tried a few times to ask them questions, but they all ignored me, preferring to carry on with their annoying and unhelpful gossiping. “Just ignore them – they’re always obnoxious like that and they’re even worse around new people and it’s very hard to get them all to shut up,” Scorpius informed me as we neared the staircase going from the second floor to the third.  
“I can imagine,” I said. Then, just to check, I decided to ask, “Do by any chance you have any idea who they keep saying I look like?”

  
“Not a clue, sorry,” said Scorpius. “Given how old some of those paintings are, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was someone who died a hundred years ago. They don’t keep particularly good track of time passing.”

  
The third floor was mainly bedrooms; Scorpius’ was filled with Quidditch paraphernalia and shared a bathroom with the room that Mrs. Malfoy intended for Steven to stay in. The room I was to occupy was all the way down at the other end of the hall, far away from everyone else, which I was glad of (low probability of seeing the boys shirtless!) but it struck me as rather odd considering Mrs. Malfoy’s fear that I would run away if not watched closely. As promised, it was painted green and had an excellent view of the hedge maze in the back garden (which wasn’t actually a maze so much as an immense flourish pattern). And it was enormous, with an ornate four-poster bed, a matching wardrobe which I assumed held the linens, a huge private bathroom, and a moderately sized sitting room. It also seemed ridiculously easy to escape from: if I could just get a bunch of bedsheets and tie them together, I could probably rappel out of the window. In other words, it was absolutely, unexpectedly perfect, which made me wonder even more what Mrs. Malfoy was playing at.

  
Scorpius seemed just as impressed by the accommodations as I was. “The last time I saw inside this room, it was a mess. Buddy did a great job cleaning it up; you’d never guess what it used to look like. There were boxes everywhere. I think my parents were using it to store things that they didn’t know where else to put or something.”

  
“Your house-elf is named Buddy?” I asked him, flopping onto the bed and trying not to burst out laughing (and completely failing at it). He nodded. “No offense, but that’s a ridiculous name.”

  
With a shrug, Scorpius said, “There are elves with weirder names.” I didn’t doubt it. “So, yeah. That’s pretty much all I’ve got to show you inside. Why don’t we go back downstairs and see if Grandmum’s done with Steven yet, and then we can find something fun to do?” That sounded good to me, so I agreed, and we set off back downstairs.

  
We were met on the second-floor landing by Stevie, who looked considerably more uneasy than he had last I’d seen him. “There you guys are!” he exclaimed. Lowering his voice to little more than a whisper, he said, “Scorpius, your grandmother is…insane. Completely delusional. Never leave me alone with her again.”

“What did she do?” I asked.

 

“She tried to convince me that…” Stevie started to say, but apparently thought better of telling us specifics. “…of some pretty weird stuff. None of it made any sense, and I’m just going to leave it at that. Anyway…Scorpius, how about we play some Quidditch? One-on-one?”

“Sounds good,” said Scorpius. “Our brooms are in that cabinet over there – I’ll go get a couple.” I thought he’d forgotten all about me, but as he unlocked the cabinet, he told me, “As soon as my dad gets home, Anna, I’ll try and talk him into playing two-on-two so you can join in. In the meantime, do you want to referee?”

I was about to agree, but Stevie protested. “Anna would be the worst referee in the history of the game. She couldn’t tell a fair play if her life depended on it!” By this he clearly meant that he was afraid I’d call fouls against him for cheating. He’s an incredibly sore loser, in that he simply refuses to lose at anything. Which I suppose I often do as well, but somehow I’m not quite as good at it (maybe because his friends don’t ever call him out for cheating the way Charlie does with me). “We don’t need a referee anyway. But you can come out and watch if you want, Anna,” he said condescendingly. As if watching him play with his brother was a privilege that was supposed to make me happy! Who did he think I was – one of his adoring Slytherin fangirls, as opposed to the girl he knew since he was a toddler, who is equal to or better than him in every respect? Had he completely forgotten who he was dealing with?

“You know, as tempting as that offer is, I’m going to have to say no. You boys go play. I’ll find something else to do.” Namely, figuring out a number of ways to get back at Stevie should he persist in excluding me.

“I’m going to have some tea, if you’d care to join me,” offered Mrs. Malfoy cheerfully, entering the room just in time to hear my response to Stevie. I fully intended to decline – the way Steven had looked after a conversation with her didn’t exactly make me want to have one – but before I could say a word she added, “I’m sure you’re curious about why I brought you here, so I promise I’ll give you a full explanation.”

I couldn’t very well pass that up. Especially after hearing all of those gossipy portraits comparing me to some unknown figure from the past. “All right, seeing as I haven’t anything better to do. I suppose tea would be nice. But you’d better have a really good reason for why you kidnapped me.”

Mrs. Malfoy absolutely lit up when she heard me agree to have tea with her; I think she’d expected that I’d need a little more convincing. “Brilliant. I’ll have everything set up for us in the drawing room, if that’s all right with you,” she said, leading the way across the entry hall. So long as I got answers, I’d go anywhere.


	2. In Which I Am Confronted With An Unusual Possiblity

As soon as we each sat down (on matching velvet covered chairs, no less!) for tea, Mrs. Malfoy started in with a bit of small talk. “So, how was your little tour?” I’d rather she’d begun by explaining the purpose of my kidnapping, so I tried to bring the conversation around to that.

  
“Fine,” I said. “It’s a beautiful old house. The portraits are very…talkative.” By which I meant impossibly annoying. “And they say some pretty interesting things, too, like…”  
“And the bedroom – is it satisfactory?” asked Mrs. Malfoy, apparently so eager to hear my opinion on that subject that she moved on to it before I could finish my sentence about the portraits. She seemed genuinely concerned that I be as pleased with my accommodations as possible. Unless I was mistaken, she wasn’t trying nearly as hard to please the boys, possibly because she was more familiar with their preferences (after all, she had known Scorpius all his life and met Stevie at least once before). Or maybe it was because all they seemed to need was each other and a couple of broomsticks.

  
“Considering that when I first got here I assumed you’d want to keep me in the cellar like a proper prisoner, yes. The bedroom is wonderful. But I’ve got to say, Mrs. Malfoy, It’s confusing to see my kidnapper going to such lengths to make sure I’m happy here. But I’m sure you’ll address that issue when you explain what’s going on, won’t you?” I asked mockingly. She deserved it.

  
Looking quite amused, Mrs. Malfoy said, “I’d never dream of leaving anything out. But please, dear, call me Narcissa.” I didn’t plan on it. Unlike Steven, I’m not a sucker. “I have to say, I really am sorry I didn’t speak to you sooner; I probably should have, considering that you’re the reason I planned this…er, kidnapping, as you insist on calling it. And who could blame you, considering that is essentially what it came to with you? I knew Steven would come back on his own, eventually, because he thinks he’s Scorpius’ brother and dead-set on proving so. But you had nothing like that to draw you here, so I had to bring you.”

  
“Oh, you had to, did you?” I asked sarcastically, inspecting the plate of scones Buddy had just placed on the low table separating me from Mrs. Malfoy, and ultimately selecting a cinnamon one. “Well, I can’t wait to hear whatever ridiculous excuse you’ve got for why that is. I don’t suppose it has anything to do with whoever I apparently look just like, according to most of the paintings upstairs, does it?”

  
“Yes, as a matter of fact it has nearly everything to do with that,” said Mrs. Malfoy, looking quite pleased. “Steven told me that you’re borderline obsessed with finding out about your real parents, but you’ve been curiously unable to find anything at all. The reason I brought you here is because I believe I have the answers to many of your unanswered questions, provided you’re willing to believe in some…shall we say, unusual possibilities.” I wondered if those possibilities had anything to do with the “pretty weird stuff” that Steven said she had tried to convince him of. From somewhere on her person – probably a hidden pocket in her dress – Mrs. Malfoy pulled out an old photograph, which she then handed to me

  
The photo was dated May 1970. It featured three teenage girls, one of whom, situated in the center, was easily recognizable by her straight blonde hair and overcompensating smile as the future Mrs. Malfoy. The other two had dark curls, though the tresses of the one on the right were lighter and slightly looser than her sister’s wild black ringlets. Either one of them could have been the person to whom the portraits had compared me, but I’d say I looked just a little more like the wild-ringlets girl on the left. “Who are they? Old friends of yours?” I asked, setting the picture down on the table.

“In a manner of speaking. They are – were – my sisters.” Mrs. Malfoy said, looking somewhat wistfully down at the photo. With a little sigh, she pointed to the girl on the right and said, “That’s actually the only intact picture I have of Andromeda; all of the others were destroyed. Really a shame what happened to her.”

“What?” I asked, curious to know more about the fate of a woman who, in all likelihood, was either my grandmother or my great-aunt. The name sounded vaguely familiar.

“She married a mudblood, completely disgraced our family,” said Mrs. Malfoy simply. “I think she opened a bakery with him or some nonsense. Anyway, we were obligated to disown her. I haven’t seen her in over forty years. And I heard that her daughter married a werewolf – honestly, it makes me sick to my stomach just to think about!”

I think she expected me to agree that the thought of her estranged niece marrying a werewolf was sickening. I didn’t quite know about that, but I was certainly shocked. “That’s my friend Charlie’s family! Or at least it could be – Her dad’s a …” After ten years of being friends with Charlie, I still couldn’t bring myself to say the word. “Well, you know. And I'm pretty sure Andromeda is her grandmum's name. Although i don't think she or her husband ever had a bakery.”

“I don’t know what’s worse – the fact that you’re friends with Andromeda’s granddaughter, or that the girl’s name is Charlie,” said Mrs. Malfoy, looking thoroughly disgusted.

“It’s short for Charlotte,” I explained, which didn’t appear to change her low opinion of Charlie in the least. So I returned to the subject of the photograph. “So if that’s Charlie’s grandmum, then that other girl must be my grandmother, which would make me Charlie’s…let’s see…second cousin. And also your grandson’s.” Lovely. Everything made sense.

Mrs. Malfoy shook her head. “Not exactly,” she said. “See, Bellatrix never had any children.”

Upon hearing that, I nearly did a spit take (because who wouldn’t?). “Bellatrix? As in, Lestrange? As in the crazy Death Eater Bellatrix?” Actually, the outburst was mainly for show. Thanks to James’ suggestion that my fierce temper indicated that my birth parents had been on the dark side, I’d done a little research and noted months before that I sort of look like Bellatrix, and also that she’d died childless because she’d been too busy torturing mudbloods and going to prison to bother with parenthood, which was probably a good thing considering that she’d been certifiably insane. “I think she might have murdered my Uncle Matthew, but I’ll have to check with my mum on that.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Malfoy uncomfortably (I don’t believe she liked being reminded that her sister had killed people). “That’s…rather awkward for you, isn’t it?”

“Well, seeing as I’m pretty sure based on what you’ve told me that I’m not actually related to her, I’d have to say it really isn’t that awkward. Although I am rather curious about why you told me you had information about my birth family, then pulled out a picture of people I sort of look like and proceeded to explain how I’m not related to them. That tells me nothing at all! And also, what does this all have to do with the reason you kidnapped me?”

Giving me a somewhat devious smile, Mrs. Malfoy said, “That’s where the unusual possibilities come in.” Producing a second old photograph, this one having a young Bellatrix – no older then sixteen – as the only subject (or at least only remaining subject; the photo was torn at one edge, suggesting that someone else may have originally been included), she said, “It’s true that you aren’t related to them by conventional means – which is what I intended to show you with the other photograph – but as it happens you are still related, Annalise. You look too much like Bella not to be. As a matter of fact, you’re virtually identical.”

Maybe it was rude of me (not that I was concerned at all with offending Mrs. Malfoy), but I burst out laughing when I heard that. It was just too ridiculous. “Identical?Seriously? I’m not really…I’m not. Just – no.”

“How would you know? You didn’t even look.” Mrs. Malfoy gestured at a mirror hanging on the wall behind my chair. “I know it sounds silly, but please, just humor me and look.”

It felt extremely stupid – I thought that I knew what my own face looked like enough to say she was wrong without a doubt – but I stood up and examined myself in the mirror. What I saw was the same thing I see every time I look at myself: a pale teenage girl, somewhat tall for fifteen years old, with a rather angular face, heavily lidded yet incongruously large dark-brown eyes ringed by thick black lashes, and extremely frizzy black hair. All of which almost worked together. Except for the frizz. In the photograph young Bellatrix clearly had a better understanding of how to attractively wear her hair than I did (a skill she apparently lost after going mad), and her eye makeup looked better, but otherwise, aside from the placement of a couple small blemishes that I understood to be environmentally rather than genetically determined, her features were the same as mine. Same bone structure, eyes, nose – everything about her face matched my face. She even had the same smile and turned her head the same way I do when I’m asked to pose for a picture.

I hadn’t noticed before how impossibly close the resemblance was when I’d first considered a possible relation to her, because all of my information about her came from history books in the Hogwarts library which only had pictures of Bellatrix as an adult, but the statement that I was essentially identical to her as a teenager was true beyond any shadow of a doubt. Which only left one question, really: how that was possible. Which I couldn’t very well ask unless I conceded to Mrs. Malfoy that she had been right. And I had no intention of doing that if I could help it. “Her cheekbones are higher than mine, and her nose is thinner…” I said, seizing on and pointing out every nit-picky difference that existed between my face and the photograph, most of which were attributable to lighting, angles, makeup, or a combination of those elements. “Similar? Yes, of course. But not identical. Not really.”

Mrs. Malfoy looked at me, bewildered. “But of course you are! It’s so obvious! How could you not have seen it?” she wondered aloud. I simply shrugged. After studying my face for several seconds more, looking for the discrepancies I claimed to have noticed, she gave me a very pointed look and said, “You’re lying. Aren’t you? You don’t want to admit you were wrong.” At that last realization, she smiled and quietly added, “Bella never did either, if she could help it.”

The physical comparison had irked me enough; being likened to a famously insane Death Eater in terms of personality definitely crossed the line. And I was furious about it (which in hindsight probably accomplished nothing so much as supporting Mrs. Malfoy’s associating me with her psychopathic sister…oh, well). Turning on Mrs. Malfoy, I yelled, “So what? Lots of people hate admitting they’re wrong – which I’m not, by the way. What are you even trying to accomplish by pointing out all of the ways you think I take after her? It’s almost like you think I actually am her or something!”

My outburst didn’t seem to ruffle Mrs. Malfoy one iota. For a few seconds, she said nothing, just let me stand there seething at her, chest heaving, until I began to calm down a little bit. Then she gently said, “Annalise, please sit down.” I sat, because I thought she’d answer my question. Instead, she apparently changed the subject of our conversation entirely. “You just turned fifteen…oh, about a week and four days ago, correct?” she asked, disturbingly calm.

“Nobody actually knows if that’s exactly my birthday, since the actual day of my actual birth is a little uncertain, but yes. That’s when I celebrate it. Did Stevie tell you that?” By some odd coincidence, Stevie shares my estimated birthday. Because our adoptive parents are friends, we had joint parties until we went off to Hogwarts.

“Yes. And it made me believe that something I used to think impossible might actually have happened.” Taking a deep breath to steady her nerves – not a good sign at all – she went on to tell me an idea so completely, utterly insane yet so disturbingly almost conceivable that it shocked me into dropping my teacup. Luckily, the carpet in the drawing room was plush enough that the cup didn’t shatter, but it did crack, and the handle broke off. “Exactly fifteen years, one week, and four days ago, my sister disappeared without a trace, as did my husband. For years, I believed them both dead, but then I met Steven, and he told me about you. Now what do you think the odds are that two children supposedly born on that day would bear such close likenesses to the two missing members of my family, and that they both be adopted with no known official documentation of their existence dating before their respective adoptions, and have all of that simply be coincidental?” Unbelievably small, that’s what. Which is why I dropped the teacup.

“So you actually do think I’m her? And Stevie too…you think he’s your…” I couldn’t bear to say it; even thinking about the implications of what I had just been told chilled me absolutely (if Mrs. Malfoy’s account was correct, that meant I was Charlie’s great-aunt!). It couldn’t be true. I wouldn’t let it be true.

Mrs. Malfoy nodded. “Yes. I do. In fact, the more I see of you, specifically, the more convinced I am that it must be true. You were raised by a poor family, you’re friends with the daughter of an Auror, you somehow got yourself mis-sorted into Ravenclaw…and yet despite all of that, your resemblance to Bella extends beyond just your appearance. You share many of the same mannerisms, the same insistence on fitting everything to your terms as much as possible, a frighteningly similar temperament…everything fits.”

“So the whole reason Stevie and I are here is to test your little theory?”

Another nod, this one slightly ashamed. I think she realized just then how stupid her plan had really been, how counterintuitive it was to kidnap me and then try to convince me to believe her implausible speculations. Choking up a little, Mrs. Malfoy said “As soon as I met Steven and realized what must have really happened fifteen years ago, I knew I needed to find you, to give you the answers to the questions I knew you must be tearing yourself up over. If Steven was desperate to meet his real family, I knew you must be doubly so. I wanted to show you the quality of life you were made for, and...”

“You know you’re completely out of your mind, right?” I blurted out.

“So I’ve been told, by my son, and my daughter-in-law, and Steven – he doesn’t believe me either – and now you. The irony of which doesn’t escape me in the least, I can assure you,” Mrs. Malfoy said with a rueful smile. “Madness runs in my family. I always assumed I had avoided it, but maybe not.”

“From what I’ve seen, you definitely haven’t,” I said derisively. “This whole…idea of yours, me being your sister – it’s all total nonsense! No sane person could possibly have come up with it. I mean, how could something like that even happen?” Especially to two people, neither of whom was stupid even if one of them was mentally disturbed, on the same day. In fact, depending on the method, it might even have had to be the exact same time.

“That, I don’t know,” admitted Mrs. Malfoy with a deep sigh. “Some fool, probably, playing around with magic he didn’t quite understand, decided to eliminate some old enemies by turning them back into children. But just because I don’t know the particulars doesn’t mean that it’s completely inconceivable.” She was beginning to sound desperate that I believe her, which actually made me even less convinced of her theory than I had been. Which was not at all. Sure, it was a freaky set of coincidences that superficially made sense, but I was pretty sure it was utterly impracticable. Mainly because I figured that if anyone tried a stunt like that on Bellatrix, they’d be killed on the spot before they could do anything.

I snorted. “Maybe not inconceivable for you, but I think we’ve already established that you’re crazy.”

Insulted, Mrs. Malfoy declared, “Not about this, I’m not!”

“Of course you’d say that. The whole point of you being crazy is that it’s obvious to everyone but you. Because it is,” I said drily, just to fire her up a bit and see what would happen. She had the potential to be even more interesting than Charlie when upset because she put so much emotion into everything. Even, weirdly, nonchalance. I can’t quite describe how, but Mrs. Malfoy has very emotionally charged nonchalance.

There was no way for her to win the argument against me, and I think she knew it, but she seemed determined to at least attempt to match me in terms of resolve because she was so convinced of her own rightness. The main reason for that, I believe, was that she very badly wanted to say she had escaped her family’s innate mental health problems. “I am not insane!” she insisted, color rising in her pale cheeks.

“Yes, you are.” Especially considering that I was not the only person to hold that opinion of her. How many different people had to tell her before it sunk in?

“No, I am not!” she said shrilly. She looked as if she might cry, so I figured I might as well benefit from that fact. I could end the argument much more quickly if I could effectively bring her to tears.

“You kidnapped me on account of a ridiculous impossibility! What else could you be but crazy?” I asked. And then I dealt my trump card, pronounced the last thing Mrs. Malfoy wanted to hear from me. “I hate you.” No sooner did the phrase escape my lips than she broke down sobbing. Mission accomplished.

Seconds later, her son walked into the room. “Mother, why on Earth did you bring Scorpius home? And Steven with him- what were you thinking? I…wait, what’s going on here? Who is this?”

I took the initiative in introducing myself to Scorpius’ father, seeing as his mother was too busy weeping to do it for me. “My name’s Annalise Doyle. I’m in Stevie’s year at school. Your mum kidnapped me along with the boys, and at present she’s attempting to brainwash me. As you can see, it isn’t going terribly well.”

“Clearly,” Mr. Malfoy deadpanned. He looked at me, then his mother (who was feverishly dabbing her eyes with a hankie to keep her mascara from running), wondering which of us he should address. Finally, he settled on me. “Annalise, would you mind if I had a private word with my mother?” How much, I wondered, did he know of his mother’s idea that his father and evil aunt had not truly died in the strictest sense of the word, but had been somehow transformed back into babies? From her mentioning that he too had called her insane, I guessed that she’d at least attempted to explain it all to him at some point but had been predictably disparaged.

“Be my guest,” I said, taking that as my cue to leave. “Are the boys still playing outside?”

Mr. Malfoy nodded. “They are as far as I know. Are you going to go out and join them?”

“Yes.” It was only a half-lie; I was going outside, but not to meet up with Steven and Scorpius. Really, I planned to mill around inconspicuously for a little while, slowly getting farther and farther way from the manor until I was far enough out to make a run for it. I’d head towards the nearest town with a sizable magical population (which, in hindsight, I should have taken the time to learn the location of), at which point I’d find somebody to tell of my kidnapping, and have them contact the appropriate authorities.

Most of the Malfoys’ gardens were fenced in by tall hedges and gates, but when I had looked over them from “my” bedroom window during Scorpius’ tour, I spotted one stretch that backed right up against a forest. That’s the general direction in which I chose to wander; through the hedge maze in the most convoluted way I could think up, as if it were actually possible to get lost in there. I pretended to be exploring the gardens, admiring the sculpted rosebushes and topiaries and ornate fountains. I remember, as a little girl of four or five, fantasizing about living in a huge house with a sprawling garden. For most girls, this is part of their pretty pink princess phase, but like the color pink, the notion of being a princess never really appealed to me – it seemed like too much pressure. I decided I’d rather skip the royal title but keep the fabulous riches. I was a weird kid.

As I wandered the Malfoy gardens, I thought more about Mrs. Malfoy’s theory. I had to admit, it made decent sense of everything I had always wondered about my origins, aside from one tiny detail: it was wholly impossible. I’d learned in Transfiguration class that physical change spells done to other people aren’t typically long-lasting. They wear off after a few days, a week or so at most. There are exceptions – people tuned into inanimate objects can never be turned back, for instance – but the more complicated a spell is, the less time it tends to last. Magically turning an adult back to an infant was certainly too complicated to last more than a couple of hours, if it was even something that could be done. There was virtually no way a spell like that could work the way it would have had to for Mrs. Malfoy’s claim to me feasible. Which meant that, as odd as it was that I’d probably been born the same day Bellatrix was purported to have died and that I looked so much like she had as a teenager, it all had to be coincidental because there was no other way for it to be.

My escape plan worked swimmingly for a little while, as Mr. Malfoy and his mother remained inside and the boys didn’t really care what I was up to so long as it didn’t interfere with their game. Or so I thought. Turns out, Scorpius was still sort of keeping an eye on me. As I reached the edge of the forest, he swooped down to ask, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, just a little…exploring,” I said, less convincingly than I would have liked.

Scorpius was, unsurprisingly, skeptical. “Um, okay,” he said, seemingly unsure of whether or not to press for more specifics. He finally settled on not, but he did ask, “You weren’t going to go into the woods, were you?”

That was it. I was as good as caught. Nevertheless, I kept playing the part of a casual explorer, on the off change that Scorpius was stupider than he seemed. “Maybe I was…why?”

“The woods go on and on for miles and there aren’t any trails. It’s really easy to get lost in there unless you’ve got a map, and even then it’s not safe to go in alone.” In other words, I shouldn’t wander anywhere he couldn’t keep an eye on me. “Plus dinner shouldn’t be too far off, so could you please just…stick to exploring the main grounds for now? Please?”

Well, I couldn’t exactly say no and dash off into the woods – he’d go and tell his father and then I’d be officially busted. I had no choice but to tell him, “All right, I’ll stay around here,” but I had every intention of sneaking out later, however. With a map. I’d climb out of “my” bedroom window while everybody else was otherwise occupied, then set out through the woods. If I got right on fashioning a long rope of bedsheets, I could leave as soon as the boys were called inside for dinner.


	3. In Which I Dress for Dinner

I meandered back through the hedge maze to the house at what I hoped was an unsuspicious “I’ve seen all I want to” pace, then made my way up to my room (and thankfully didn’t encounter Mr. Malfoy or his psychotic mother anywhere along the way), where I surveyed the distance I was going to have to climb, what I’d have to look out for on the way down, and the most direct possible route off of the grounds. Then began the business of collecting enough sheets to reach the three stories from the window to the ground below. I snuck into and pilfered the linens from every open or easily lock-picked bedroom I came across, save the boys’, Scorpius’ parents’, and Mrs. Malfoy’s, then brought it up to “my” room, creating a massive pile of Egyptian cotton fabric on the floor. Due to the sheer size of the pile, I decided to hold off raiding my own room until I ran out of material.

Next came the task of twisting and knotting the sheets together one by one, working in the sitting-room for easy concealment of my project should somebody come knocking to inform me that it was suppertime. Or, alternatively, that my participation was requested in a pick-up Quidditch game which, despite my dislike of everyone else present at the manor that day and my desire to leave as soon as possible, I wouldn’t say no to. Primarily because I wanted to beat Stevie at his own game. Though both of the boys are on their House team and I am not (the biggest reason for which is that my housemates don’t trust me), I’ve played pick-up with Charlie and her siblings many times, and I’m a fairly good flyer. Teddy, who was a star Chaser in his school days, taught me loads of trick plays, too. With the right teammate, winning would be easy. However, as time wore on, I began to think that Scorpius had forgotten his promise to start a two-on-two game. Or that his father had refused to play; that was actually more likely. Scorpius seemed very reliable.

However romantic and adventurous it might seem in stories for the protagonist to descend from a high-up window away from someone or something, making a rope out of bedsheets is mind-numbingly boring, and attaching the sheets tightly enough to each other so that they can support a person’s weight without ripping is very tricky business. It took me the better part of an hour to transform the jumbled pile into a snug rope that, when I dangled it out the window – checking first to see if the coast was clear – just skimmed the ground. All I needed were a couple more sheets to extend the rope enough so that it could be tightly secured to a bedpost or something else that would stay put while I climbed, and I had a decent idea of where I might be able to find some in the room.

Flinging open the ornately carved wooden doors of the wardrobe, I was surprised to discover that it held not spare linens, but clothes. Lots of them. Skirts, shirts, dresses, and shoes, all in the opulent dark colors one would expect to find in the home of a wealthy pureblood family. Everything looked new, the styles refined but not archaic, and at a glance, most of the items looked about my size. That was probably the thing that most distracted me from (or actually, made me temporarily forget) the purpose I’d had in mind opening the wardrobe in the first place: gorgeous, expensive clothes that would probably fit me. I am by no means one of those girls who obsess over their looks, primarily because I’m not naturally pretty enough for it to do me any good, but the contents of that wardrobe were basically the culmination of all of my little-girl dreams of being rich and stylish rather than poor and dressed in a knobbly hand-knit sweater.

I couldn’t help but wonder if that wardrobe was where Scorpius’ mother stored clothes she couldn’t fit in her own room, despite the fact that her and her husband’s living space was not remotely close to mine (it was approximately directly below their son’s). Scorpius had said that his parents used to use the room for things they didn’t know where else to put. Maybe these were clothes his mum had bought and then decided she didn’t really like, so she had exiled them up here, forgotten and unworn. In that case, I believed that it would be perfectly within bounds if I tried them on. Especially considering that their owner wasn’t home.

The first piece that caught my eye was a lacy black top (I wear black a lot; Charlie says I have an aversion to color). I ditched my ugly sweater and put it on; it fit perfectly and looked quite nice with my jeans. My sneakers, however, had to go; I swapped them out for a pair of Oxford heels, also black, also exactly my size. Taking in the overall effect of the outfit in a nearby mirror and seeing how absolutely stunning it looked, I couldn’t help but remember Mrs. Malfoy’s words about “the quality of life I was made for” and all that. She might have been mistaken about a lot of things, but I knew she’d gotten at least one little thing right: I was meant for better things than Aunt Susan’s sweaters.

Speaking of Mrs. Malfoy, she showed up quite suddenly not two minutes later, while I was still admiring my getup in the mirror. Actually, I didn’t even notice her come up behind me until she spoke. “That looks lovely. Although, I…”

She so startled me that I gave a weird little yelp as I spun around to face her “Bloody – Mrs. Malfoy! How’d you get in here?” Such a stupid question, in hindsight. I deserved the answer I got.

“The door,” she said drily. Trying to be clever, I suppose. It wasn’t working. “And I told you earlier, please call me Narcissa.”

I chose to keep ignoring her request for me to call her by her first name; instead I remained focused on her reason for showing up unannounced. “I know you came through the door,” I snapped. “The real question is, why didn’t you knock before coming in? I could have been changing in here, for all you knew.”

Mrs. Malfoy nodded. “That is true, you could have been. That was rather rude of me. I apologize. And I realize it’s no excuse, but I did think that you had gone outside. I only came up here because I found something for you and I wanted to put it here.” I saw that she was holding a small black box, which either meant she was telling the truth or that she wasn’t but had come prepared with “evidence” that she hoped would make her seem as if she was. Being cynical, I thought the latter was more probable. “But I am glad I found you. If it means anything, I really am sorry for how I’ve been treating you. You were right to criticize me earlier; I wasn’t being very reasonable, and the kidnapping was quite out of line. I hope you’ll forgive me for it. Please, Annalise, if there’s any way I can make up for my behavior, please don’t hesitate to tell me.”

“I don’t need anything from you,” I said bitterly. I didn’t doubt that she wanted to do something to make up for what she’d done, but I got the feeling she’d make any excuse not to give me what I really wanted from her. “Except for you to return me to school. But that really goes without saying, doesn’t it?”

Not at all surprisingly, Mrs. Malfoy blanched at the idea of returning me. “Well, yes. I suppose it does…but I didn’t think you had any plans for the week, Annalise. What do you have back at school that’s so important to get back to right away?” Freedom, that’s what. A life without crazy people trying to indoctrinate me into believing a bunch of half-baked nonsense. “Please say you’ll stay, just for a couple of days,” she begged.

“And if I don’t? What then?” I asked. If all went well with my escape plan, I’d be back at Hogwarts in just a few hours. I wondered how she’d react. Not that I cared in the slightest.

I think Mrs. Malfoy knew that she couldn’t do anything if I was dead-set on leaving, not if she didn’t want to make me hate her more than I already did. “Well, I…I think you’d sorely regret it,” she said lamely, and nervously shifted her grip on the box, before handing it to me with an apologetic smile, like she hoped its contents would change my mind somehow: “Here; this is for you.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t intend to open it. Maybe later. However, Mrs. Malfoy just sort of stood there looking expectant, and I figured the quickest way to make her go away was to look in the box. Inside was a necklace whose silver pendant rather looked like a bird’s skull on a simple black satin ribbon. Quite peculiar-looking, but I thought it beautiful in a quirky sort of way. Not that I was going to let Mrs. Malfoy know that.

“Well?” she asked as I examined the necklace. “What do you think?”

“Thanks,” I repeated, with a little more emphasis.

Completely undeterred, she suggested, “Put it on, why don’t you? It’ll look just perfect with that blouse.”

I appreciated Mrs. Malfoy’s subtlety in pointing out that I was wearing stolen clothes, but I was embarrassed all the same. I’d wanted to appear indifferent, as if none of the fine things in her house particularly appealed to me, and there I was, patently exhibiting the opposite of that sentiment by playing dress-up. “Oh, this. I…I really should change out of it, shouldn’t I?”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” she said.

That quite surprised me. “Really? You mean your daughter-in-law won’t mind if I…?”

Mrs. Malfoy laughed, the same way my mother does when my seven-year-old sister, Emmalyn, does something cute and naïve, which I found extremely irksome. “Oh, you think these clothes belong to Astoria!” she said. “No, they’re all yours, dear. I purchased them for you specifically. Anything you want, you can keep. Consider it a belated birthday gift.”

Considering how much was in that wardrobe and how much it all must have cost, I was floored. It had to be too good to be true. “You’re telling me that you bought all of this…for me?” I asked. She nodded. “How did you know my size?”

“I didn’t. When I ordered everything, guessed. Then when it all came in, I charmed the pieces so they would fit you,” she explained. “The only real risk I took was with the styles, so I’m curious – how did I do? I take it you’ve found at least a few things you’re fond enough of to at least try on, but overall…” Everything was beautiful. Mrs. Malfoy’s acuity as to what things I might like was uncanny. Which was irritating seeing as the basis for her selections was undoubtedly a more modern take on her evil dead sister’s personal tastes in clothing.

“You did all right,” I said apathetically.

Even that small concession seemed to make Mrs. Malfoy very, very happy. “Thank you Annalise. That means a lot, coming from you.”

“Well, almost anything would have been better than that hideous sweater.” Except, of course, for the four other ugly sweaters I possessed. Someday I was going to burn them all. It was going to be wonderful.

“True,” said Mrs. Malfoy, looking with disdain at the lumpy pile of knitwork I’d left on the floor next to the wardrobe. Then she added brightly, “But now you never have to wear it again. Or any of the other dreadful things you own because your family can’t afford any better.” That kind of snarky comment about my adoptive family would have bothered me, except that it was entirely true. They do their best to keep it from me and Emma, but they are poor.

“Yep. Never again.” Except actually not. Even if I burned the ones I had, I would inevitably be given more ugly sweaters and then be forced to wear them in family Christmas photos.

Neither Mrs. Malfoy nor I seemed to know what else to say on the subject, so there was a moment of awkward silence. Then Mrs. Malfoy spoke up, “Since I’m here, Annalise, I might as well let you know that supper won’t be long, and around here, we typically dress for dinner. So as lovely as you currently look, I suggest you not wear those pants.” Walking over to the wardrobe, she quickly reviewed its contents and selected a green silk skirt. “Here; something like this should work nicely.”

I took the skirt and looked it over. It looked as if it would hit just above the knee, which wasn’t bad. It would look very classy with the shirt and shoes I already had on, and it was a very pretty deep-emerald color. “Not bad. Thanks.”

“You’re very welcome. I’ve got to see after a few things downstairs, so I’ll leave you be. Just come down to the dining room in twenty minutes, all right?”

“Sure, whatever.”

Having had her say, Mrs. Malfoy exited the room as quietly as she’d come in. I put on the skirt and the necklace – both of which looked pretty fantastic on me, so I wasted a couple more minutes admiring my new clothes before I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to care about them. Recalling my escape plan, I then began combing the room for spare linens. Eventually I found some in a hidden compartment under the window seat, so I attached them to my rope and checked the length again. It was perfect. Realizing that leaving while everyone else was eating wouldn’t work because my absence would be noticed before I was far enough away to avoid being caught in the act, I resolved to go first thing after – provided the boys didn’t decide to go back outside.

Just as I had finished coiling the rope up and hiding it under the bed, there came a knock at the door. I rushed over to open it, expecting Mrs. Malfoy come to tell me something she’d forgotten before. “Alright, what is it this – oh.” It wasn’t Mrs. Malfoy after all, but Stevie. Without his little tagalong Scorpius. And he looked sharp.

Not that I was surprised. He’s always taken an almost absurd amount of pride in his appearance. And really, he wasn’t all that much more dressed-up than on an average school day. He had on a crisp white dress shirt, black pants, black shoes, and a tie in approximately the same color as my skirt – it looked almost exactly like his everyday school uniform, but just by the self-satisfied look in his face I could tell that the outfit was worth hundreds of galleons more than his uniform, and he was loving it. “Hi, Stevie...oh, and Scorpius,” I added, seeing that Stevie’s brother had appeared on the scene in an almost identical outfit. They looked like twins, the only obvious difference being that Stevie was taller.

“Hey, Anna,” said Stevie, at the same time as Scorpius said, “Hello.” They both smiled, and for once both of the smiles looked genuine (Stevie’s prone to faking it). “You look…”

“Amazing?” Scorpius offered.

Stevie shook his head, smirking. He, who had been messing with me my whole life, wasn’t about to give me a sincere compliment if he could help it. “Not quite. Sorry, Annie, but the fact that your hair is almost bigger than your head sort of wrecks the whole effect for me.”

Unfortunately for him, Stevie insults my hair so often that it has (almost) completely ceased to offend me. He hates it when I ignore him when he’s trying to push my buttons, so as difficult as it often is, as tempted as I often am to punch him in the face, I try to make a point not to react. It doesn’t always work out. “So, what are you doing here?”

“Well, Dad came outside and told the two of us about ten minutes ago to get ready for dinner and so I wanted to make sure you got the message too,” said Scorpius. “And also I wasn’t sure you knew what that meant and how you were supposed to look. But I guess someone already told you, so…yeah. That’s good.” I have to wonder how the Malfoys produced someone as innocently sweet and considerate as him. Maybe he gets it from his mum’s side of the family.

I nodded. “Yep. Your grandmother was up here not too long ago telling me that jeans aren’t appropriate attire”

“I’m surprised you listened to her,” commented Stevie.

“Why? Because she’s crazy?”

“No, because you’re…you,” Stevie said. “You absolutely hate people telling you what you can and can’t do. And you were so mad about being kidnapped that I thought you might try to annoy Narcissa into returning you by doing the exact opposite of whatever she suggests to you.”

Actually, I had started off wanting to do that, but quickly realized that being persistently difficult with Mrs. Malfoy didn’t seem to accomplish anything except provide further “evidence” for her Bellatrix theory. She might have been persuaded into taking me back to school if I had acted excessively nice and so convinced her that I wasn’t anything like her criminally insane sister, but I knew that I couldn’t pull that off believably enough to work, so I didn’t bother. “So I listened for once. So what? That doesn’t undermine my entire personal philosophy, does it?”

“It shouldn’t,” said Scorpius, so earnestly it was almost comical.

Rolling his eyes at his brother’s apparent naïveté, Stevie hissed, “That was rhetorical; you didn’t have to answer her.”

Scorpius’ cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “I knew that. I just…I wish I could talk to girls as easily as you do, Steven.

“Anna’s not a normal girl,” Stevie said, snickering. “She’s…well…it’s complicated.”

“Your brother and I are next-door neighbors-slash-friends-slash-enemies who absolutely hate each other but not really because we’ve known each other so long that we can’t quite bring ourselves to. And because our mothers are best friends so we have to play nice, except when they’re not looking in which case we don’t hesitate to get into petty fights that I almost always win,” I informed him. And if Mrs. Malfoy was right we were in-laws in a past life, which might actually explain a lot.

"What are you talking about? You never win," Stevie countered. "Never once have you argued with me and not lost."

"I have so!"

"No you haven't."

"Yes, I have."

We went on like that more or less all the way to the dining room, with Scorpius tagging along taking in our bickering with great interest. I got the sense that as an only child growing up on a large estate with no obnoxious next-door neighbors around his age to speak of, he had not had nearly enough exposure to the sort of comically pointless arguing that made up the majority of my conversations with his brother. By some lucky chance, the timing of our arrival at the table was such that I got in the last "have so" before propriety dictated that we shut up. By which I mean that Steven shut up and I got the last word by default, something I didn't hesitate to point out to him; as he sat down, I hissed in his ear, "I win." He turned bright red, but said nothing.

As there were only five people at the manor that day including me, we took up less than a third of the enormous mahogany dining-room table. Mr. Malfoy, being the man of the house, sat at the head, flanked by his mother on the right and Scorpius on the left. Steven immediately snagged the place next to Scorpius, leaving me beside his delusional grandmother, who immediately noticed that I looked a bit agitated. “Is something the matter, Annalise?” she asked as Buddy, slight and wide-eyed even by house-elf standards, went around filling soup bowls.

“No.” I didn’t care how unconvincing I sounded; I was going to avoid discussing my emotional state with that woman at any cost. “Everything’s fine.”

Mrs. Malfoy nodded understandingly and cast a somewhat suspicious look at the boys, who were at the moment describing their Quidditch game to Scorpius’ father in what I thought was a ridiculous amount of detail (and, judging by the impassive look on Mr. Malfoy’s face, he didn’t seem to be listening to them). “All right, if you say so,” she said in a way that clearly showed that she knew I was lying. “Draco, you met Annalise earlier, right?” I found it interesting how she seemed to swing between the two extremes of being totally out of touch with reality and being uncannily perceptive.

“I did.” Draco (I realized that it was rather stupid to think of him as Mr. Malfoy and his mother as Mrs. Malfoy; one of them needed first-name status, and me being me, I decided that it wasn’t going to be the one who’d asked for it) said, not looking at me. In fact, over the course of the meal I noticed that he rarely looked at Steven either. It was as if he wanted to pretend that neither of us existed.

“Good.” Mrs. Malfoy said, satisfied. She then turned back to me. I was her little novelty, the person she knew the least about (in the concrete sense, at least), and she seemed quite intent on figuring me out. Besides, the boys were interacting almost exclusively with each other and Draco was being quite curt with her to show his disapproval of her kidnapping antics, so she pretty much only had me to focus on. “Annalise, I’d love for you to tell me a little more about yourself. I never did find out much from you in that respect. What’s your family like? And your friend Carly…”

I had not planned to give Mrs. Malfoy the satisfaction of an answer, but I just had to speak up and correct her, “Her name is Charlie.” And then, as if compelled to actually tell Mrs. Malfoy what she needed to know about my best friend, I continued, “She’s a metamorphmagus. She usually has pink hair, plays Chaser on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, and is always up for adventure. We met at a park near my house when we were four and we’ve been best friends ever since.”

Stevie and I had been playing hide and seek that day. He was hiding. I was seeking, but I abandoned the game when I discovered a pink-haired girl about my age lurking under the slide, a ratty old stuffed rabbit in one hand. I still remember the first thing I said to her: “How come you have pink hair?” She looked startled for a moment. Then her hair suddenly turned brown and she said, “What? I don’t have pink hair.”

“You just did. Are you magic?” I demanded. The girl looked unsure of how to answer. “It’s okay. I’m not a muggle. You can tell me. My name’s Anna.”

“I’m Charlie,” she said, her hair slowly turning back to pink, proving that I’d been right about her. When I giggled and said, “That’s a boy name, silly,” Charlie stubbornly told me, “No it isn’t.” I insisted, “Yes it is.” We went on like that for a while, then I finally said, “Hey Charlie, let’s be best friends. Okay?” I liked her. Automatically. Instantaneously. Plus I was in the market for a new best friend. Stevie just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

Charlie shrugged, which I interpreted as a yes. “Okay, good. Do you want to play hide and seek with me and my other best friend Stevie? He’s over there. See him? By that tree? The blond kid? He’s really bad at hiding, but don’t tell him or he’ll cry.”

“That sounds fun, but I’m playing Harry Potter with my brother and sister,” said Charlie, pointing to a violet-haired girl a couple years older than her and a blue-haired boy a couple years older than that, fighting invisible enemies with sticks. “I’m Fluffy the vicious three-headed dog. Teddy is Harry, and Ellie is Hermione. If they come over here, I’m supposed to attack them. Unless they sing to me, then I’ve got to fall asleep.”

“Cool,” I said. “Can I do that too?” Charlie said, “Sure, okay,” and the rest was history. At least until Stevie realized I’d forgotten to find him, got mad, and dumped a fistful of wood chips in my hair. Luckily, Teddy was able to sort things out by suggesting that he be Fluffy head #3 (previously Charlie’s stuffed bunny had that role), and when Stevie said no he proposed that we all play tag instead. Not to brag, but even as little as I was, I was the best at being “it.” And then we all went back to Charlie’s house for red velvet cupcakes.

“So it never bothered you that your best friend is a half-blood or that her father is a werewolf?” Mrs. Malfoy asked, disrupting my reminiscence of the early days of my friendship with Charlie.

“Legally speaking, I’m half-blood too,” I informed her curtly. Both of my adoptive parents have one muggle and one wizard parent. “As for Charlie’s dad…well, I didn’t actually know about that until I was almost ten. And I still try not to think about it too much, honestly.” I’d cried when I found out. To find out that my best friend’s kind, nerdy father was in fact a bloodthirsty nocturnal monster pretty much flattened my already-shaky concept of adults’ trustworthiness. Suddenly I understood that almost everyone was probably hiding something.

My words on Charlie’s father seemed to conciliate Mrs. Malfoy, but she seemed outraged at the notion that I was being raised half-blood. Her cheeks went pink and her voice came out an indignant shrill, “Blood status is not something that changes based on adoption – it’s a position one is born into! And you, Annalise, were born a pureblood, therefore you are one! And you ideally should not be associating with the likes of this Charlie person.”

I snorted; the idea of my being able to be choosy about my friends was, frankly, almost totally foreign to me. “I hate to burst your bubble, lady, but I am literally the least. Liked. Girl. At. Hogwarts. Even if I wanted to – which I don’t – I couldn’t just drop Charlie and find some new people to hang out with. So sorry to disappoint.”

“It’s true,” Stevie piped in. “Everyone thinks Anna’s mental –because she is – and Charlie is the only person who likes her anyway.” Even my Ravenclaw housemates don’t want to associate with me if they can help it, and they’re all about as neurotic as it gets. Just among the fourth-year girls, Jess is obsessive-compulsive, May is a paranoid vegetarian who thinks everything the Ministry does is part of an elaborate conspiracy, Waverly is allergic to everything, and Violet gets queasy when she has to talk to a boy for any reason…and yet I’m the weird one.

“Oh,” said Mrs. Malfoy finally. No other word could have expressed surprise, disappointment, discomfort, and a handful of other assorted emotions more accurately or more succinctly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t expect…” she sighed, perhaps realizing that a girl with a similarly volatile disposition to Bellatrix, without a confirmed old-money background to ensure that people would respect her anyway, wasn’t likely to be very popular among her peers. “Well, I suppose Charlie isn’t the absolute worst person you could be associating with,” she said.

I believe she said that more to convince herself than anything else. The only thing worse in the eyes of a conservative pureblood than a pink-haired half-blood with a werewolf father was a pink-haired half-blood with a werewolf father who is technically a blood relative. Charlie was the sort of person that Mrs. Malfoy would have preferred never to need to acknowledge the existence of. Knowing that I was close friends with Charlie was almost as awkward for her as hearing that Bellatrix had killed my uncle. With that understanding, it was no wonder that she abruptly changed the subject. “So, why don’t you tell me about your family?”


	4. In Which I Set the Record Straight

“My family. Well, I…” I couldn’t think of what to say. It was a simple question, but I hardly knew where to begin describing them to Mrs. Malfoy, because a simple answer would never do justice. My relationship with my family is not difficult, but at the same time it is. I love my adoptive parents, but at some fundamental level I fail to connect with them, and they with me. “My parents are nice,” I finally said. A limp, unrevealing descriptor for a man and a woman who are devoted and kind and optimistic and as boring as ham sandwiches. And neither of them understands that high-strung is, for me, not simply a state of mind or a choice I make about how to behave. It’s my personality, and it’s fairly immutable. “My father has an office job at the Ministry,” I finally said. “My mother stays at home.” With Emma.

“Her dad’s with the Muggle Liaison Office,” clarified Stevie. Being the son of one of my mum’s best friends, he knows almost as much about my family as I do. Somehow, he saw that as giving him the right to blab certain things I didn’t think needed to be mentioned. Such as what, specifically, my father does for a living: a low-rank job in a dead-end office. That’s why my family is so poor. Not that the Edwards are a whole lot better off: Stevie’s mother is an assistant secretary and his father is a food photographer for the Prophet, which is probably the stupidest job ever. He literally takes moving pictures of inanimate objects.

Stevie never talks about his family in detail – or at all, if he can help it – at least not for the past few years, since he met Scorpius and became obsessed with the idea that he could become one of the Malfoys (which, given Draco’s apparent habit of ignoring him, doesn’t seem to be working out too well). The pathetic thing is, Mr. and Mrs. Edwards don’t seem to have any clue that their son doesn’t actually want to be their son any more. They think Stevie adores them. I’m not even sure that they know anything about his friendship with Scorpius. Knowing him, he has probably created an elaborate fictional life though the letters he sends home, one where he fosters peace and understanding throughout the student body in his spare time rather than teasing overweight Hufflepuffs and trying to suck up to the rich and powerful.

For some reason, Scorpius found the description of my parents’ careers as intriguing as Mrs. Malfoy found it upsetting (his father seemed to be trying quite hard to look thoroughly uninterested in what we were discussing, but I could tell he was at least a little curious). “I didn’t know there was a Muggle Liaison Office! What do they do there?” he asked, wide-eyed, as his grandmum fixed me with a look of such intense pity that I couldn’t bear to look at her.

Officially, the purpose of the office where my father works is to try and maintain good relations between muggles and the magical community, but they don’t really interact much with actual muggles. “They study muggle culture and technology,” is how I have taken to explaining it. Which aspects are studied seems to me fairly arbitrary. Dad once spent a year looking at Muggle literature and its portrayal of magic. Apparently, some squib named Joanne Rowling once wrote a seven-volume exposé on Harry Potter’s school days and sold it as fiction, and it was wildly popular with the muggles. The Ministry made her change a few key details, of course, ostensibly so no one would know it was all real. But I read a little when Dad brought the books home from work one day, and they definitely didn’t change enough. To this day I still half-expect a lot of Muggle tourists to show up in Diagon Alley next time I’m there.

“It’s kind of an irrelevant line of work,” I said, shrugging. “So, yeah. Anyway, that’s a bit about my parents. I also have a little sister. Emma. She’s seven.”

I didn’t want to get into too much about Emma, because explaining her and my relationship with her would require a long story that I wasn’t too eager to tell. But of course, Mrs. Malfoy had to ask, “Is she adopted as well, or…?” and I had to answer her because otherwise Stevie probably would, and because he didn’t know the complexity of the situation he’d make Emma out all wrong.

“She isn’t.” Emma is the biological child that my parents thought they couldn’t have when they jumped the gun and adopted me.

“Anna hates her for some reason,” said Stevie.

“I do not hate her,” I said. “I just…don’t really like her very much.” Emma, being in essence a small version of her mother, has never been anything but sweet to me, but I think it’s fair to say that she ruined my life just by existing. If that’s not a reason not to be particularly keen on someone, I don’t know what is.

What happened was this: Having read parenting books on how to raise adopted kids, my parents tried to introduce me early on to the concept that the woman I called “Mum” had not actually given birth to me, but that I had come to live with my parents when I was a baby, and that was pretty much it. Evidently, they didn’t read the parenting books close enough, because they didn’t tell me much regarding where babies normally come from, except for the uselessly vague description that they were made from love (such a Hufflepuff way of putting it) and somehow grew in their mothers’ bellies. Stevie was an only child and Charlie was the youngest in her family, so I had no concept of what that meant, nor did I care until I was seven years old. That’s when Mum told me that she was going to have a baby.

I was excited at first. If I’d been much younger, I would have stayed excited, but I was more precocious than my parents knew and increasingly unsatisfied with kiddie explanations. I had questions. I wanted details, but all I ever got from my parents when I asked them, “How are babies made?” was the same ridiculous shtick about love. So I did what any self-respecting precocious adopted seven-year-old with parents who still treated her as if she were five would: I stole the parenting books and read them. Then I took all questions about their contents to Charlie’s mother, to whom I intentionally gave the impression that my parents had already told me a little about everything I was asking for details on, so she answered me more frankly than she perhaps should have. Then, armed with my newly acquired basic euphemistic knowledge of sex, I confronted my parents. “I found out all about where babies come from,” I announced.

“Did you now?” my father asked, amused. He doubted me. I could see it in his eyes.

“Yes. I did,” I said, and then proceeded to rehash to them all that Charlie’s mother had told me. Needless to say, my parents were shocked. “Now,” I said, “I have a few more questions. And I need answers to all of them.” My mother bit her lip nervously. My father swallowed hard. I had them right where I wanted them. “Why are you having this baby?”

Slightly put off by the bluntness of my question, Mum asked, “What do you mean why, Anna?” Was that supposed to be a trick question? “You know, why. As in, why do you want this baby? You have me. Aren’t I good enough? What could you possibly want a baby for?” I demanded.

“You’re wonderful, Anna. You’re the best thing that ever happened to us,” Mum said, patting me on the shoulder. I hate being patted. “This baby is so that you can have a little brother or sister. Won’t that be nice?”

No. I liked being an only child. And my mother was still talking to me as if I were five. I was extremely insulted. But I pressed on with my questions. “Why did you adopt me?” That one really made my parents squirm. To his credit, my father answered me honestly, if rather indelicately. He was too nervous, too flustered by the fact that he was being seriously interrogated by his seven year old daughter, to phrase things better. “Your mum and I didn’t think we could have a baby, but we always wanted one, so we adopted you.”

Mum recognized at once the impression those words would give me and didn’t hesitate to scold him: “Jonathan!” But the damage had been done.

“So what you’re saying is, this baby you’re having is the baby you really wanted when you adopted me?” I asked, feeling like I had just been punched very hard in the stomach. Neither of my parents said a word, which I interpreted as a yes. I ran out of the house crying, convinced that I would surely lose my parents’ love once they had their precious, long-anticipated, real child. “I’m moving to Charlie’s!”

Unfortunately, Charlie’s family turned out not to be home. I later found out that they were away visiting friends for the weekend. For a long time, I stood on their front step, kicking and pounding at the door. “Let me in!” I cried, over and over again until my father showed up and told me to stop. I kicked him in the shin. “Go away. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

“Anna, sweetie…” he began, kneeling to look me in the eyes. Which only gave me a greater reach of places to try and hit, screaming, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you” until my words didn’t sound like words anymore and I dissolved into convulsive sobbing. “Anna, listen. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about the new baby,” he said, placing one hand on my shoulder and using the other to lift my chin so I’d look at him … or at least trying to. I refused to meet his eyes. “I hate the new baby,” I spat.

“Just because you’re adopted, Anna, doesn’t mean we’ll love you any less when the baby comes,” he said gently. “Your mother and I are going to have to spend a lot of time taking care of your new little brother or sister, but that’s just because babies need lots of things. I promise, we will not forget you. We will not stop loving you, or love you any less than the new baby. Do you understand, Annalise?” There was no lie in his voice. My father was an honest, simple man. He meant what he was telling me. And I wanted to believe him, but I could never rid myself of the lingering thought that they would automatically prefer the new baby because it would be the one they’d waited for so long to have.

My doubt in my parents’ ability to love equally became a self-fulfilling prophecy. As soon as Emma was born, I began looking for signs of favoritism. And I found them. Setting aside the issue of Emma needing attention because she was a baby and couldn’t do a single thing on her own besides wet herself, I nevertheless found that our parents naturally seemed to gravitate towards her. They didn’t mean to, but they did anyway. Emma made sense to them in a way I never could, even before she could talk, because she was so much like them: calm, cheery, and undemanding. In contrast, I was moody, headstrong, hard-to-please, and (as exhibited by the way I had handled being told that my mother was expecting) a little too clever for my own good. I got on my parents’ nerves with innocent questions, like “Are we poor?” and “If we’re not poor, why can’t I have that [insert name of exorbitantly expensive item here]?” and “Why are muggles so stupid?” And I got in trouble a lot more than Emma, even though she cried more, which I thought was totally unfair.

The clearest proof I came across that my parents liked Emma more was in something I overheard on the day I turned 8 ½, while Mum was in the living room and I was sneaking a brownie from the kitchen. “Well, Martha, I just put Emma down for her afternoon nap,” Dad said, entering the scene. “She is such an easy baby; I can hardly believe it!” Yeah, yeah. So I’d heard.

“I know,” Mum agreed. “She’s great. Sound sleeper, doesn’t fuss much…it’s a dream come true! And a day-and-night difference from her sister. With Anna, it sometimes seemed like she’d never stop crying, remember? It got to be so exhausting! And we couldn’t take her practically anywhere because she’d cause such a bother; I was grateful for the few times we could convince someone to mind her so we could go out for some peace and quiet.”

Hearing that, I almost choked on my brownie; I had annoyed my parents so much as a baby that they seemed to consider themselves lucky when they could pass me off to a babysitter! That instantly led me to wonder if they had ever really liked me, or whether they just put up with me because I was the best they could do. After all, adoptions in the wizarding world are pretty rare. It’s quite possible that I was the only baby available for them to take in – or one of a very few – and my parents had wanted a child so much they probably hadn’t been in any position to be picky at the time about what kind. Or maybe my parents just didn’t know that I was a particularly difficult baby until Emma came along to provide such wonderful contrast.

Living with Emma and her uncanny sweetness was like my own personal curse. I couldn’t escape it, and nobody seemed to understand the effect it had on me. Despite my mother’s frequent reassurances that I was a wonderful kid, Emma was obviously a lot more likable than me. She made me look bad, was what it came to. There was just this quality about her that people absolutely loved, a quality I didn’t have and didn’t know how to attain. Something about me seemed to make people a little uneasy, but nobody could resist Emma. They called her adorable, even though she was a little chubby and her ears were just slightly lopsided, so in my opinion she was kind of funny-looking. It was especially bad at family gatherings, with all of the aunts and uncles and cousins cooing over her and giving me the stink-eye because I didn’t join in. And the aunts were in a habit of pointing out that Emma has Dad’s eyes and Mum’s hair and dearly departed Uncle Matthew’s nose, every one of her features a stamp of authenticity and family acceptance that only served to remind me that I was an outsider. An import.

Thinking all of that over, I compacted my feelings about Emma into the following statement so that Stevie knew it wasn’t arbitrary: “I don’t like Emma because, being my parents’ biological daughter, she’s so much like them that it’s kind of awkward for me,” I told him. “I can’t help feeling that I don’t quite fit.” He said nothing in response – to me, at least. Instead, he turned emphatically to Scorpius and began an in-depth discussion of the prospects of professional Quidditch teams for the upcoming tournament season. The clear intent for him doing that was to show Draco how well he fit, in the interest of furthering his assimilation into the Malfoy family, the little suck-up.

The more that came out about me and my life, the more uncomfortable Mrs. Malfoy seemed to become. She clearly cared quite a bit for me in her own odd way, and it distressed her to hear that I didn’t connect well with my adoptive family. “That’s absolutely awful,” she commented, half to herself, as I glared at Stevie for ignoring me. “And judging by all of your pauses I don’t suppose I know the half of it, do I?”

Determined not to let Mrs. Malfoy feel sorry for me, I told her. “Actually, all things considered I have a pretty good life, or I would if I didn’t keep screwing things up for myself. That’s the awful part.” According to Charlie, I’m unhappy because I choose to be. It was my decision not to like Emma, to look for “proof” that my parents played favorites, and to be antisocial towards my classmates before they’d formed a proper impression of me. I don’t really believe her on all of that, but there was one choice I made that I know is directly related to my current problems, and it was that choice I used as an example. “The Sorting Hat didn’t just accidentally put me in Ravenclaw. I sort of picked it for myself. It was my mistake.”

Mrs. Malfoy looked confused to hear that. “Why would you ever choose to be put into the wrong house?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” I said, trying to think of a way to shorten it a bit. “But I guess it really started a couple of months before I started at Hogwarts. We had the Edwards over for dinner one evening, and after a little while the parents got to talking about sending me and Stevie off. Mr. Edwards asked my dad what House he thought I’d end up in, and my dad had to stop and think for a few seconds. I’ll never forget, he looked bloody terrified, and so did my mum, and somehow, I could just tell that they both thought I’d end up in Slytherin.”

“And that was a problem for them, I suppose?” Mrs. Malfoy asked, as if wondering how my parents could possibly be so small-minded as to dislike what was probably in her opinion the most respectable and prestigious House there is.

I nodded. “They were both in Hufflepuff, and all the Slytherins they’d ever met were bullies.” Especially in the case of one particular boy who’d teased my father mercilessly for having bad acne, a sulky blond kid by the name of Draco Malfoy. “Anyway, my dad didn’t want to admit that he had somehow raised a kid for whom Slytherin was even a remote possibility, so he lied for maybe the first time in his life and said, ‘Well, she’s very smart, so maybe she’ll end up in Ravenclaw.’ And I suppose I took that to mean that’s where he wanted me, and I also didn’t want to make my parents’ fears real and end up in Slytherin. I wanted to prove to them that they’d adopted a good kid, so when it was my turn to be Sorted, I begged the Hat to put me in Ravenclaw. It said it hoped I knew that I was doing, trying to tell it how to do its job, but it let me have what I wanted. But of course it was right and I shouldn’t have meddled. Maybe if I had listened, I would have more friends.”

Stevie shook his head. “I don’t know. I just can’t picture you being in Slytherin. Or having friends. You’re just too…”

“If you say ‘weird’ or ‘psycho’ or any of the other adjectives that James Potter and company typically use to describe me, I swear I am going to shove this down your esophagus,” I warned him, holding up a dinner roll. “Just a heads-up.” Honestly, I could have threatened worse. The last time James had insulted me, I’d kneed him in the crotch and jinxed him so he could only speak in limericks for the next three days.

I’m sure that Stevie had one of those Potteresque slights in mind, but he knows that I take my threats quite seriously, so he instead went back to discussing the Falmouth Falcons’ new Beater, Mason Montgomery, with Scorpius. I was, honestly, quite disappointed; I had been all set to snap at him and then angrily storm out, away from Mrs. Malfoy’s innocent but problematic questions and Draco’s sullen silence and the boys’ incessant Quidditch-related chatter. Hopefully another opportunity to leave the table would present itself soon. Especially because Mrs. Malfoy’s next question was, “So, I take it you and Steven have known each other for a while? And your adoptive families are close?”

“Our mothers met when we were toddlers. His family moved in next door to mine and they discovered they both had a really fussy adopted kid. They quickly became best friends, and so by default Stevie and I were friends until we were almost five. Then, due to social convention, he decided he couldn’t possibly have a girl as a friend and so he switched to teasing me like all the other boys in our class. I didn’t really care; I had Charlie so I didn’t need him.”

Whenever Stevie made fun of me in primary school I’d hit him (or sometimes bite him, depending on the circumstances), and he would be so ashamed to have been beat up by a girl that he wouldn’t tell on me and he’d convince all of the other kids that nothing had happened. He never got in trouble with teachers and he kept me out of trouble too, especially after Emma was born. Maybe he figured my parents had better things to worry about than me acting out at school. It was those types of things that kept me from actually hating him. He was annoying and we never agreed on anything, but when it really mattered he had my back...in his own weirdly circuitous “I’m-not-really-helping-her” sort of way. Unfortunately, in recent years Stevie’s interest in his social reputation and the popularity of targeting me for insults means that we weren’t quite on as good terms in our frenemy-ship as we used to be, and as dinner wore on I decided that I was sort of starting to hate him.

Since he usually can’t resist talking when the subject is himself, Stevie had to put his opinion in, declaring, “I didn’t make new friends in grade school just because she was a girl – I did it because I couldn’t stand her. And I still can’t. It’s like a nightmare, being kidnapped along with her. I feel like she’s going to try and murder me any moment now.”

I saw that he was suspiciously eyeing the knife that I was using to cut my steak, and I was compelled to set the record straight. “You know, contrary to popular belief I don’t attempt to stab someone every time I’m holding a knife. Just sometimes.” Actually it had only happened once, second year, and that had been an accident; James snuck up behind me and startled me during dinner, and when I turned around to yell at him I almost knifed him in the face. Second year was, perhaps not coincidentally, when the word “psycho” was first applied to describing me. “Can’t you drop the act and maybe treat me like an actual person with actual feelings for once, Edwards? Is that really so hard?” I refused to take insults from Stevie anymore, because of all people he should know better. I’d been punishing him for it for nearly ten years.

Stevie, as I knew he probably would, didn’t drop the act and certainly didn’t back off from ridiculing me. “Really, Annie? Really? Do you honestly expect, with the way you act, that anyone could possibly think that you have any actual feelings?”

“Yes! Because I do have them, and you know it! You aren’t James, who wrote me off as mental just because he’s stupid Harry Potter’s son and he thinks that gives him the right to decide who’s worth respecting at school and who isn’t – he doesn’t know a single bloody thing about me except that he thinks I seem creepy! You, on the other hand, have known me practically your whole life, so you haven’t got an excuse to say things like that, not to me! And you had better believe me when I say that I will mess up your precious pretty face if you keep trying to deny that!” I screamed, waving the knife at him for emphasis.

“Ouch,” said Scorpius. Draco looked about to wet himself with fright, and Mrs. Malfoy looked very nervous as well. But Stevie, frustratingly, remained cool.

“Okay, whatever, Anna,” he said.

Furious, I threw the knife at him. Well, actually I was aiming for the wall just above his head, but no one ever taught me how to properly aim, so I think it was just dumb luck that the knife went where I intended it to and didn’t stick in Stevie’s eyeball. “Steven Edwards, I absolutely loathe you.” I said, and then finally stormed out of the room, making my way purposefully across the foyer to the grand staircase.

“Yeah? Well, I loathe you back! So there!” he yelled after me.

“Annalise, I…” I heard Mrs. Malfoy begin to say something, and maybe even get up to try and go after me, but Draco cut her off.

“Leave her. What are you going to be able to do anyway?” he asked cynically. And then he added, more quietly, “That girl is seriously unhinged. So, of course, you gave her a steak knife. Way to go, Mother.”


	5. In Which The Elf Ruins Everything

Funnily enough, I had expected my flight from the oppressively awkward atmosphere of the dining room to feel more triumphant. The idea that I might feel so strongly about the argument which had allowed my leaving that I would end up bursting into tears definitely never occurred to me. But as I sprinted up to the third floor, down the hallway and into my bedroom, where I removed the rope from its careful hiding place under the bed and began uncoiling it, as I tightly secured one end of the rope to the bedpost with a triple knot, I didn’t seem to be able to stop the tears from coming. I had never before truly considered how miserable I was until Mrs. Malfoy made me think by asking about every facet of my life.

In answering her questions honestly, I realized that few people really respected me, even less liked me, only a fraction of those people understood me, and only Charlie did all of that even remotely well (but maybe I should give my parents and Emma credit for trying; after all, there’s nothing they can do about the fact that they’re apparently incapable of comprehending that I’ll never be much like them). And I know I did nothing to deserve the way that people tend to view me. It wasn’t like I volunteered to be singled out by James first-year to become his – and, by extension, the whole student body’s – favorite person to insult. All I did was accidentally set him on fire. That could have happened to anyone. And I didn’t choose to be high-strung and precocious and difficult for my parents to handle. I was born that way. And I really did know that Mum and Dad loved me a lot despite my moodiness. It was just easier for them to love Emma. But I could deal with that. I could deal with the petty mockery of my peers (most of the time, anyway). What I couldn’t stand to deal with was being held captive, along with the second most annoying person that I knew, by a crazy woman who thought I had been a Death Eater in a past life. Thankfully I had the means and opportunity to leave, and I intended to use them.

I began my climb as soon as I had changed back into my sweater, jeans, and sneakers. The evening was clear and cold, the last rays of the setting sun washing the Wiltshire landscape in orange and gold light, a sharp contrast to the twilight shadows cast by the trees and shrubbery. I realized as I pushed off the windowsill that it would be fully dark before long, but I wasn’t too worried; surely a bit of underage magic to light my way away from the home of my abductor would be forgiven by the authorities. The nighttime chill would be annoying – already I was shivering a little as light gusts of wind lapped at my exposed hands and face, and wished I’d had the foresight to snatch my coat from where I’d left it in the front hall – but hypothermia seemed but a small price to pay for freedom, and I could probably keep warm enough if I kept moving. There was nothing that could stop me. Except, I realized with a start as I was about halfway down the side of the building, for the fact that I had forgotten to get a map. I had no idea where I was headed, and looking out over the shadowed gardens and the vast expanse of forest enveloping the grounds I could see no indicator of which direction to go. Even the front drive seemed to lead out into nothingness.

Dinner had not been quite halfway over when I had thrown my knife at Stevie and fled the room, so I figured that I had plenty of time to climb back up, go to the library, and grab the first decently detailed map of the area that I laid eyes on before restarting my journey. I’d waste much less time doing that than wandering aimlessly in the forest after dark, lost and at the mercy of whatever vicious wild animals might happen to live there (I was not surprised to later learn that there were lots of them). It would be a shame if I got attacked and had to call for help from the very people I was trying to run from. So, although it was extremely inconvenient and a lot more difficult to ascend rather than descend the rope, I inched my way back up to the third floor and through the window and then headed straight out to search for a map, leaving the rope still dangling down the side of the house. I didn’t see the point in wrapping everything up if I would need it again in only a few minutes.

To get to the library, which was just off of the drawing room on the first floor, I had to pass rather close to the dining room. At least my path allowed me to get my jacket. From the sounds of conversation I heard, dinner seemed to still be in full swing. The boys had miraculously moved on from Quidditch to…more Quidditch. To be more specific, Stevie was trying to get Scorpius to join in gossiping about the members of the Gryffindor team, who they would be up against in their next school match, and Scorpius was asking his brother if he thought he might be named captain next year.

Each boy stuck to his preferred topic of conversation hoping that the other would switch, but neither did. It was quite funny, especially when Steven started talking directly over his brother: “Hale Newson was caught smoking in the girls’ bathroom last week – and he’s a prefect!” But I couldn’t just stand around listening to them; I had a map to find and an escape to finish, and I had to hurry to the library if I wanted to be gone by the time dessert was over.

I’m not sure what, exactly, I had expected – maybe a sign on the shelf or a huge book labeled “maps” – but I felt like I had to scour practically every inch of the library before I came across a large, dusty envelope in a large, dusty drawer that just so happened to contain a hand-drawn, probably not very accurate diagram of the Malfoy property and surrounding area as it existed 100 years ago. Maybe I should have kept looking for a better one, but I felt like it had taken long enough to find that one and I’d just have to go with it. Plus, the portrait of Scorpius’ 5x great-grandfather was getting on my nerves. He kept calling me “girly” and telling unfunny jokes: “Here’s a good one, girly: Why did the Weasley cross the road? Because someone threw a knut! Ha!” He snickered wheezily for nearly a minute. I rolled my eyes and left the room.

As I got to the third floor, I was highly confident that absolutely everything was in order for my escape. I knew (almost) exactly where I was going, how I was going to get there – it was all going to work out seamlessly. There was only one problem, which I discovered as soon as I opened the door to my room: the window had been shut and the rope was gone. Not just untied from the bedpost or hauled back up. Either of those happenings would have been bad enough, but no, my carefully crafted rope was missing entirely. And I had a pretty good idea what might have happened to it.

“Buddy!” I shouted. “Get in here!” House-elves, I knew, only took direct orders from family members, so I wasn’t sure I had the authority to command him, but I tried anyhow. He had foiled my escape; I wasn’t just going to let the witless little creature go on with his life without at least attempting to scold him for ruining everything I had worked on all evening.

Luckily for me, Buddy showed up within a few seconds. “Yes, miss?” he said meekly.

“You were just in here, right?” Buddy nodded. “Did you by any chance find a bunch of bedsheets, all tied together, hanging out of the window?” Another nod. “And what did you do with it, may I ask?”

The house-elf blinked, apparently perplexed. “Buddy put all of the sheets back where they belong, Miss,” he said carefully.

“You couldn’t tell that they were tied the way they were for a reason? That I was using them for something?” I asked, skirting around saying what I was actually using them for since he didn’t actually need to know. Buddy shook his head ashamedly as I ranted at him, “It took me a very long time to get all of those sheets up here and attach them all to each other, you know. And all I did was step out for a few minutes, and you come in and undo all of that hard work!”

“Buddy is very sorry to have inconvenienced you, Miss,” he squeaked, but he sounded less sorry than confused. He had just been doing his job, cleaning up and making sure everything was in its rightful place. He didn’t understand what he’d done.

“Being sorry fixes nothing,” I said irritably, as much to myself as to Buddy. “I was this close to leaving, to going back to school, and now… now everything’s all wrecked!”

“Oh,” said Buddy timidly, finally comprehending that I was upset because I had wanted to use the sheets to escape. “Buddy did not know you were not happy here, Miss.” And then, after a pause, “He will try harder from now on.” Typical house-elf, interpreting my displeasure as his fault. I’d have corrected him, except I knew it wouldn’t do any good. He would never believe my real reason for wanting to leave, as it was a criticism of the family he so loyally served. So I said nothing and just let him go contritely on his way to clean another room.

I spent a significant chunk of my evening slouched in one of the sitting-room chairs, staring out the window at the darkening hedge maze and sulking. Thanks to Buddy, the bedsheet-rope idea was unquestionably out. Even if I could amass enough sheets without being found out, tying them together would take way too long. I’d have to leave in the middle of the night. And walk for four or five miles towards a town that I didn’t even know for sure would contain people who could help me get back to Hogwarts. Yes, I was desperate to leave, but I did not feel quite desperate enough to take such a huge chance in the middle of the night. I told myself that I could tolerate spending one night at the manor before attempting another escape in the morning. After all, the accommodations were terrific, what with the comfortable private suite and all. Just the people sucked: my brown-nosing know-it-all old frenemy, his painfully innocent little brother, their apathetic and weirdly silent father, and the annoyingly well-meaning madwoman. Each intolerable in his or her own way, some harder to ignore than others. But I could probably avoid them for the most part. If I stayed in my room with the door locked, I didn’t have to see or speak to any of them unless I wanted to, which I didn’t.

The only thing I wanted right then was to never see Mrs. Malfoy again, to never have to put up with her pitying my only slightly underprivileged upbringing, or the way she seemed to always be comparing me to her evil dead sister and unnervingly finding more similarities than differences despite my half-blood background. I also wanted to never see Stevie again, but unfortunately that was never going to happen as long as we both remained at Hogwarts.

At about eight-thirty there came a knock at the door. For obvious reasons, I didn't answer. “Annalise, I know you’re in there,” Mrs. Malfoy said cajolingly from the other side. “Please open the door.”

“Go away!” I screamed at her. I considered adding some obscenities, but couldn’t make up my mind before the moment for adding anything and having it sound natural passed.

“Oh, dear. I really have made a horrible mess of things with you, haven’t I?” she sighed miserably. “Well. I know I already said it, but I really am sorry. For everything. I haven’t done a single thing right since I decided – stupidly – that it would be a good idea to bring you here without warning, and I feel absolutely terrible about it. Especially all of those awkward questions at dinner. I just wanted to know more about what sort of life you have. Honestly, I didn’t intend to touch on so many uncomfortable subjects. And I didn’t know that Steven would mock nearly everything you said. You have every right to be upset.” She got that right. After a brief pause, Mrs. Malfoy continued, “I’m going back downstairs now. Stay up here and keep sulking if you wish. Just call for Buddy if you need anything."

Soon after she finished saying all of that, I heard clicking footsteps heading away from my door; Mrs. Malfoy was indeed leaving me alone as she had promised. While I didn’t doubt that she sincerely regretted the disaster she’d unwittingly caused by kidnapping me, I suspected that she didn’t actually regret the actual act of kidnapping me. After all, she had needed me to provide “support” for her theory about what had actually happened to her husband and sister. Without me as a second example, Stevie was just a weird coincidence, easily explained away as Draco’s secret love child or something. Which he probably actually was. Explaining me was tougher – though I promised myself I’d do it someday – which Mrs. Malfoy equated to concrete proof of her rightness. She was glad to have kidnapped me

Remaining in the sitting-room doing nothing but drumming my fingers on the windowpane soon became boring, so I began (halfheartedly at first, but after a while I sort of got into it) looking through all of the nooks and crannies of my room looking for something to amuse myself. If all else failed, I’d try on a few more outfits, but luckily my search did not disappoint. In the nightstand drawer, the first place I looked, I found some old sheets of fancy parchment and a couple of black fountain pens – excellent for devising revenge schemes against Stevie or anyone else I might like getting even with. Also in the drawer were a rather run-of-the-mill murder mystery novel and a book on interrogation techniques with a scrap of folded paper marking the chapter concerning effective intimidation and demoralization.

I set the books aside to possibly look at later and was about to start in on a list of various ways to get back at Stevie for being a jerk, but I was interrupted.“Annalise? Are you in there?” Scorpius called hesitantly, knocking lightly on my door.

“Leave me alone!" I shouted back at him.

“All right then, if you’re sure” said Scorpius, sounding almost disbelieving.

“Of course I'm sure,” I said flatly. “Why are you over here trying to talk to me, anyway? Isn’t your brother missing you following him around and basking in his incredible awesomeness?”

“No. He’s busy playing chess with Dad. I was playing him, but I quit. He cheats.”

Shocker. “He cheats at everything, in case you’ve never noticed,” I informed him, finally opening the door to face him so I didn’t have to shout everything I said. Honestly, I would have been surprised if Scorpius hadn’t noticed after being Stevie’s closest confidant for nearly three years. “He’s always done that. Ever since I can remember, your brother has been cheating at every game people are stupid enough to agree to play with him. It’s because he hates losing. He can’t stand not being the best.” Which is probably one of the bigger reasons why he doesn’t like me much; there are too many things I can beat him at even if he cheats, and even more situations where if I can’t beat him fairly I can still manage to foil his cheating with dirty tricks of my own.

Scorpius sighed. “Yeah, I know. I’m just sick of it. I mean, I’m his brother! Isn’t it, like, common decency not to cheat your own family?”

“Not in your family, it isn’t. Don’t you know anything about history? I think you’re the first Malfoy ever to insist on fairness.” Or at least the first in a century or two, whatever. “So your father actually agreed to play chess with Stevie? I thought he hated him.”

At the very mention of the strained relationship between Draco and Stevie, Scorpius visibly deflated. I could tell he really wanted a full-time brother, wanted Stevie to be warmly accepted into the family almost as much as Stevie did, and it probably frustrated him that his father didn’t seem to like Stevie at all. “They’re settling a bet, I think. If Dad wins, we all go back to school as soon as possible; if Steven wins, we can stay the night,” he explained. “And I don’t think Dad hates Steven, per se. Or at least he wouldn’t if he just got to know Steven a little more. He just…doesn’t know what to do about Steven, I think. Because Steven’s obviously my brother, but he’s not really…he’s just my half-brother, because I’m my mum’s only child. So I guess that means that my dad must have cheated on my mum at some point, but he doesn’t want to admit it to anyone, and he can’t say that Steven’s his son without admitting that. So he’s just kind of stuck about how to deal with that.”

“I bet he is.” No wonder Draco’s default position was to ignore the situation and pretend that Stevie didn’t exist. “Did he know anything about Steven existing until last Christmas?”

Scorpius shook his head. Then, without warning, he launched into the story that Stevie had been about to tell me before Mrs. Malfoy sent me off on the full-house tour with Scorpius, about how Stevie had come over at Christmas and initiated his campaign to become an established Malfoy. “Part of him not knowing about Steven was my fault, actually,” he began. It seemed like an interesting tale, and it promised to reveal quite a bit about what Steven and Draco and Mrs. Malfoy all thought of each other, so I let Scorpius into my room and invited him to take a seat while he told it all to me. “I was supposed to write to my parents and tell them that I had invited Steven over for Christmas, but I forgot. And I didn’t tell Steven that I forgot, because I thought that when my parents finally met their missing son, they’d be so happy that it wouldn’t matter if I told them about him ahead of time or not. Also, I thought Steven told his family he was spending Christmas with me. I didn’t know that he lied and told them he was staying at school.” Typical Stevie, hiding things from his adoptive parents. “So when we arrived in London and met up with my dad…”

“Let me guess: your dad wasn’t too happy to see the two of you together?”

“He actually had a little trouble telling us apart, at first,” Scorpius said with a mischievous little grin. “But basically yes. After Steven introduced himself, Dad told him flat-out, ‘you’re not my son.’ We could tell that was a lie. Anyway, since Steven’s parents didn’t know what he was up to and the train had just left to go back to Hogsmeade, Dad had no choice but to do the polite thing and take Steven along and let him stay for dinner. Mum absolutely flipped out when she met Steven, and she started yelling at Dad. She kept asking how it was possible that Steven looked so much like him and yet not be his son, and he said he didn’t know how and she said he had to be lying. That’s when I figured out what the problem must be. I should have known when I first met him, because we’re a little too close in age to have both parents in common, but somehow I never thought of that.”

Oh, Scorpius. Fourteen years old and yet so ridiculously naïve, which, away from Stevie, made it extremely difficult to hate him as much as I did the rest of the members of his family that I’d met. He was just too innocuous, and given his parentage there was simply no reason why he should be that way, which made him interesting and also a teensy bit endearing. But not very. “So your parents quarreled, and then what happened?”

“Well, while they were in the middle of arguing, Grandmum came down to see what all the fuss was about. She also needed a little time to tell me apart from Steven, but she was actually a little quicker at it than Dad. Then she asked how old he was, and when he said he’d be fifteen in April her eyes went really wide and she hugged him and said, ‘It’s really you! I thought I’d never see you again, but here you are, back home at last!’ Which confused me, because I didn’t think that if my dad didn't know anything about him that she’d know anything either, let alone like him.” But of course, she had her own idea about who Stevie was.

He went on: “We were all a little confused, actually, especially when she said that Steven actually wasn’t my brother. And when Dad asked her who she thought he was, she told him something that I didn’t hear. He told her it was ridiculous and impossible, but she dared him to come up with a different explanation if Steven wasn’t his son, and he couldn’t and my parents started arguing again until Buddy came in to say that dinner was served. Dinner was…well, it was pretty awkward. A lot like tonight. Dad didn’t say much and neither did Mum, but they did a lot of glaring, at each other and also at Steven. Steven and I talked about Quidditch and Grandmum asked him pretty much the same questions she asked you, but he said a lot more to her than you did. I think he was just happy that someone other than me wanted to listen to him. He mentioned you a couple times,” Scorpius added, as an afterthought.

He had talked about someone other than himself for once? How unlike him. “What did he say about me?”

With a shrug, Scorpius said, “Not a lot. I mean, your name first came up when we were talking about the latest Quidditch match we’d played in, the one where Steven and James got into that shoving fight and Steven broke James’ nose – you remember, don’t you?” I nodded. I’d sort of wanted Gryffindor to win because Charlie was on the team, but I’d also been quite happy when they lost and James got hurt. “Steven was complaining about how he got detention and had to take Hagrid’s dog for a walk in the Forbidden Forest with you, and he said something like, ‘It figures that I’d have to do detention with Annalise.’ And then he made a crack about how you must have had to check your hair for small animals afterwards.” Of course he had. “Grandmum seemed to think that was amusing.” Of course she had. “She seemed really interested in you for some reason; she asked a few more questions about you, and near the end of dinner she said she’d be interested to meet you sometime.” All right then. That meant I had Stevie to blame for inspiring Mrs. Malfoy to kidnap me along with him. Hopefully he knew he was to blame, too. “That reminds me; I’ve been meaning to ask you, Annalise, do you have any idea why you got brought here with Steven and me?”

“Yep,” I said. “It’s because your grandmother is insane.” He didn’t need to know anything more than that, so I turned the conversation back to Christmas. “So Stevie told your grandmother everything she wanted to know?”

Scorpius deliberated for a moment, perhaps wondering whether to address my question or my insinuation of his grandmother’s mental instability, then said, carefully, “Well, not everything everything – like you, he didn’t say much about his family – but he told her a lot. And then he asked her how he could possibly be related to me if he wasn’t my brother. She said she’d tell him after dinner, but that never actually happened because Dad took him right back to his parents. I think she told him today, while I was showing you around, and I asked him what she said, but he won’t talk about it. He usually tells me everything,” Scorpius complained. “He said I’m one of the only people he feels like he can trust a hundred percent, but apparently not, if he’s keeping stuff from me.”

“What he’s keeping from you isn’t worth repeating,” I assured him. The best way to squash an idea that only a few people know about is to keep it contained. Sharing it, even to laugh at its sheer ridiculousness, would allow it to continue existing in some form. If I wanted Mrs. Malfoy’s ideas to disappear, I could not spread them.

“So you know what it is that he isn’t telling me?” asked Scorpius, rightfully a little ticked off that I too knew about something he didn’t. “How? Did he tell you?”

“No. Are you kidding? Your brother doesn’t trust me as far as he can throw me. He’d never share something like that with me. It was your grandmum who told me.” And we had circled back around to her being crazy. Just the thing I wanted to discuss. Not. “She…she didn’t want to believe that your dad had another son with another woman, so she made up another explanation for who Stevie could be and she wholeheartedly convinced herself it’s true. The only problem being that what she thinks is impossible.”

Too late, I realized that even telling Scorpius that much about his grandmother’s theory was probably too much. I hadn’t intended to pique his interest in the subject, just head off a few follow-up questions…while paving the way for the most obvious one: “What’s the explanation she came up with?” Scorpius asked.

My answer was very, very blatantly avoidant. So avoidant it was almost painful. “That isn’t for me to tell. Ask your brother.”

“All right, I will,” Scorpius said resolutely. “As soon as he finishes his game.” He’d never get anything out of Stevie. That much I knew for sure. Not a shred. If Stevie had made up his mind not to talk about Mrs. Malfoy, then he wouldn’t, not for the world. Poor Scorpius was doomed to failure from the start.

“You go ahead and do that. Just…please don’t tell him that I told you anything, okay?”

“Okay.” He nodded, standing up and turning towards the door. Then, out of the blue, he said, “Just for the record, Anna, I don’t think you’re a psycho. I know Steven does, and I used to think maybe he was right, but now that I’ve actually met you and talked to you a little, I think you seem – well, not normal, exactly, because you’re really not a whole lot like most of the other girls I’ve ever met – you’re different, but not in a psycho way.”

While it was true that I had started out as a first-year not deserving to be called psycho, a lot had changed in four years. After being stuck with that label for so long, I began to…not embrace it – I still hated it with a passion – but I think I began to somewhat go along with it, until I probably did start to deserve it a little. I began to find it genuinely hilarious when people I didn’t very much like (which was almost everyone) got hurt. And I started having dreams with rather violent content which I didn’t consider nightmares. Scorpius was well-meaning, telling me that he didn’t think I was as bad as Stevie and everyone else thought, but he was wrong. Not that I was going to tell him; instead I just said, “Good to know. Thanks.”

“Scorpius!” the sound of Stevie’s shouting travelled down the hallway just as I finished thanking his little brother for the unmerited positivity. “Scorpius, where’d you get off to? I won the game, Scorpius! We don’t have to go back just yet! We can stay here!” Stevie yelled.

“Well, I should go now,” Scorpius said apologetically as he headed out. “See you later, Annalise!” I said nothing, just nodded and watched him step into the hallway.


	6. In Which I Make Sense of my Nightmares

I remained in my rooms for the rest of the evening, settled in the sitting-room with the novel I’d found and a cup of tea I requisitioned from Buddy. It was a rather typical mystery: a wealthy man is found dead in his home one night and none of the stories of the other people present at the house even remotely match with each other. Everyone seems to have a motive, except for the girlfriend of the dead man’s son. Which, of course, probably meant that she would turn out to be the killer. After everyone else’s motives got debunked, she’d inevitably turn out at the last possible moment to have a secret vendetta against her boyfriend’s family. In books, it’s always the least likely person.

Mrs. Malfoy turned up again around ten o'clock, no doubt checking to make sure I was still there since she hadn’t seen or heard practically anything from me for a long time. “Annalise, dear? Are you all right in there?” She sounded just shy of panic, like it had recently been brought to her attention that extended silences behind closed doors might mean I had taken off somewhere.

“Yes,” I said, just to prevent her from freaking out for no reason, which would be impossibly annoying.

“What have you been doing all evening?” she asked.

I heard the click of the lock turning as she spoke; of course she could open the door if she wanted to. It was her house. And here I thought I could keep her out if I wanted. She had purposefully given me that impression earlier, to give me space and time to calm down from dinner if I needed it. How nice of her to let me think I could be in control of who I interacted with when I actually couldn’t be.

“Oh, nothing.” I really wished that by some stroke of luck Mrs. Malfoy wouldn’t actually come in, that she would just say goodnight and leave me alone, though I knew that she was not going to do that. She’d want to say goodnight to my face, which in her mind was her sister’s face as well.

The door swung slowly open with a grating creak seconds later and Mrs. Malfoy (now in a dressing-gown with hair partially undone) stepped delicately into the room, glancing around for clues as to my doings the past few hours. “So, you’ve just been up here doing nothing except for sulking?” she asked skeptically as her eyes swept over the nightstand and thankfully didn’t linger. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath at all until I involuntarily let out a small sigh of relief that she hadn’t noticed anything.

“Well, Scorpius came up here and we talked for a while, but otherwise…yeah. Pretty much.” I shrugged.

Mrs. Malfoy, having finished her brief once-over of the area, nodded, making a rather unreasonable show of being attentive. “So that’s where he went during Steven’s little chess game with Draco – good to know. What did you two talk about?” she asked, perching herself on the window seat, hands primly folder as she looked up at me, eager for whatever meager scraps of information I might choose to toss at her.

Another shrug. “Stevie, mostly. And also a little bit about you.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Malfoy said drily, in a way that made it perfectly clear she knew I wouldn’t have said anything even remotely positive about her or the boy she categorically denied was her grandson. “Forgive my curiosity, what exactly did you say to him about us?”

“Nothing much more than what he already knew. It was mostly him telling me things. Like how this whole mess with Stevie and me got started, at Christmas. And how his parents reacted to Stevie showing up unannounced, and all of the confusing things you said – which he’s quite curious about, and a little offended that no one will tell him much of anything except that it isn’t any of his business, by the way. I’m guessing all the secrecy is because you never want him to find out who you think Stevie really is?”

Sheepishly, Mrs. Malfoy nodded. “Well, it would be terribly awkward if he found out. He’s very easygoing, I know, but telling him anything might strain things somewhat, with Steven and with me and maybe also with his parents, and I’d hate for that to happen. It really is better if he doesn’t know, but if it offends him to not know…” she trailed off, looking suddenly on the verge of another breakdown based on the way she was anxiously wringing her hands, then confessed to me in a rather shrill whisper, “Honestly, I haven’t a clue how to handle this!”

“How about you drop the ridiculous speculations and somehow persuade your son to admit the truth?” I scathingly advised. “Draco obviously had an affair a long time ago that he never told anyone about, and Stevie is the product of that, hence the family resemblance. His birthday and everything else must be purely coincidental.” Which meant, by extension, that her husband was stone-cold dead as previously assumed. I didn’t care a bit that that revelation would totally crush her dumb little fantasies. They’d needed to be crushed by someone sometime.

That proposition seemed to upset Mrs. Malfoy more than persuade her, though. “It is not a ridiculous speculation!” she declared, her passion on the subject causing her to spring to her feet much more quickly than one would expect of a woman her age.

“Sure it isn’t,” I told her condescendingly.

Mrs. Malfoy sighed, looking over at me with desperate intensity, as if wishing she could simply will me into changing my mind or at least playing along. I didn’t move, say or do anything except stubbornly meet her gaze until she looked away. “I’ve no hope at changing your mind on this or anything else, have I?” she asked, with a deep sigh.

I shook my head. “Nope. Not unless you’ve got some actual evidence that’ll prove your point beyond any shadow of a doubt that you haven’t shown me for some reason.” She’d never sway me with coincidences and circumstantial details. And it was clear to me that the only thing that would cause her to give up believing the impossible was if her son finally came clean about his long-suppressed misconduct. Apparently we’d come to an impasse.

“I thought as much,” she said sadly. “I rather underestimated how stubborn you can be. But maybe something will turn up later to make you reconsider?” Though she tried to sound hopeful, her tone was still overall one of doubt. If she didn’t know right then of the existence of something that would change my mind, then it probably didn’t exist, and I think she knew it. After another sigh, she forced a smile and said, “Well, at any rate I hope you have a good night, Annalise. I’ll see you in the morning.” Then she quietly left the room.

From the time Mrs. Malfoy left to the time I finally got to sleep, I kept reminding myself that all I had to do was get through one night at the manor and then I could put the kidnaping and everything that had happened at the manor behind me, forever (provided, that is, that the boys never talked to me about it after the fact, and I didn’t think they would). All in all, I didn’t think the night would be too difficult, what with the fantastically luxurious accommodations and all. Virtually everything I could ever want or need for my stay and more – in the material sense, at least – could be found right there in the room, and the few things that weren’t immediately at my fingertips were able to be requested from Buddy, who must have been under orders to take certain simple commands from me, since he brought me tea when I’d asked for it. It was quite easy to imagine that I’d have been exposed to such a privileged life if my birth parents hadn’t died or given me up or whatever. Even though Mrs. Malfoy’s claim regarding my background was clearly fictitious, I still believed that they had been pureblood.

The bathroom especially blew me away, in that it was stocked with things I hadn’t the faintest idea existed previously, but might very well work wonders, especially on my hair. And everything smelled absurdly good to boot, but I decided that I’d wait till morning to put it to use. Exhausted as I was on account of all the energy I’d spent during the day staying constantly mad at everybody (not to mention climbing halfway down the house and then back up), all I did that evening was quickly wash my face and brush my teeth before climbing right into bed. I don’t usually sleep well in unfamiliar places, but I suppose I was too tired and the bed was too comfortable for me not to quickly fall fast asleep

The dream started as it always did: with me running through a mazelike array of very tall shelves containing faintly glowing spherical objects, which would have provided the only light in the darkened room except that not far behind me, the shelves were all exploding and toppling over. It was pure chaos. I could hear a man moaning, apparently pinned under the wreckage; people shouting spells and yelping in pain; ghostly voices issuing from the piles of smashed glass – but I wasn’t running away from the explosions so much as at a small band of about six teenagers ahead of me, none of whom I could quite make out the appearance of. One of them, the one in the lead, was carrying one of the glowing spheres. I knew as surely as I had ever known anything that it was him I wanted…or technically, the item he had with him. I had the sense I didn’t really care what happened to him, whether he lived or died in the process of my obtaining the sphere.

Suddenly, the boy and his companions took a sharp turn; in the darkness, I couldn’t make out which direction they’d gone in. I stopped short, looking around for any trace of them. There were at least three paths they could have taken out of the room. Choosing the wrong one might mean they’d be able to escape, and I had a vague understanding that I’d be in major trouble if that happened.

“…we need to organize. We'll split into pairs and search,” came a voice from beside me, indistinct at first but steadily growing clearer. It belonged to a man with long hair, so absurdly blond he could only be a Malfoy, who fancied himself in charge. I didn’t particularly like the idea of buddying up. Somehow I could tell that I wasn’t too fond of any of the ten or so black-cloaked men who’d gathered around to get instructions from Malfoy. And if the space they left between themselves and me was any indicator, they weren’t fond of me either. “Don't forget, be gentle with Potter until we've got the prophecy, you can kill the others if necessary,” Malfoy added, then proceeded in pairing everybody off and giving each pair a direction to go in (I ended up assigned to a particularly stupid-looking bloke; we were to go left). He put particular stress on the don’t forget and if necessary bits, looking right at me as he spoke so I knew they were reminders for me.

And so the chase began, out of the smashed prophecy hall and into a round chamber with doors on all sides. Each pair picked a direction do go in. I was lucky enough to find three of the kids on my first try, and pursued them through a series of weird rooms - one without proper gravity, another containing a tank of attacking brains which managed to take out a redheaded boy - and finally ended up back in the entrance chamber. Potter still had the prophecy, but only he and his slightly chubby friend were still on their feet. I had seen two other kids hurt in addition to the redhead boy: a girl had injured her ankle, and another had been flung out of the way and knocked unconscious. Since there had originally been six kids, I supposed that one had probably gotten incapacitated in one of the other rooms. As the chubby boy tried to help his injured comrades, Potter continued trying to fight (although it was all too easy to deflect everything he tried to cast at me).

Potter held up the prophecy, threatening to smash it if I or anyone else tried anything, then sprinted into another room with me and Malfoy and three others right behind him, knocking all of the furniture out of our way to get to him faster. All we could really do was run; the way he was holding the prophecy, it’d break if anyone tried to curse him or take it by force. Five more cloaked men came in through various other doors and down the terraced steps of the amphitheater-like chamber, until we had the boy completely surrounded and laughably outnumbered. I noticed he was trembling, so badly I thought he might collapse as he backed away. “Potter, your race is run. Now, hand me the prophecy like a good boy,” Malfoy said calmly, putting out his hand.

“Let the others go, and I’ll give it to you,” said Potter, trying to make it into a deal of sorts.

Malfoy shook his head, smirking. “You are not in a position to bargain, Potter. There are ten of us and only one of you… or hasn’t Dumbledore ever taught you how to count?” The rest of us joined in laughing, until we were interrupted by a voice from behind us. It was Chubby, dashing in as backup. He had a bloodied, possibly broken nose and it showed in his voice. “Stubefy!” he yelled, over and over, to absolutely no effect, until finally Dimwit (who was the closest to him) grabbed him as hostage. Chubby tried to break free, but Dimwit’s grip on him was just too strong

“Someone Stun him!” yelled Dimwit. He didn’t seem to like holding the struggling boy.

“No no no,” I stepped forward, my wand pointed at a terrified Chubby. Everyone looked at me, confused. “No, let’s see how long he lasts before he cracks like his parents…unless Potter wants to give us the prophecy.”

“Don’d gib id do dem!” Chubby yelled, fighting still harder against his captor, frantic to break free before I could hurt him. I paid him no attention.

“Crucio!” I declared, almost casually. When the curse hit, Chubby screamed and writhed so much that Dimwit was forced to drop him. Potter looked at his friend, all the color draining from his face; I stopped the torture and informed him as Chubby lay sobbing on the floor, “That was just a taster. Now, either give us the prophecy or watch your friend die the hard way!” Within seconds, he had pulled out the prophecy and was holding it out to give to Malfoy in exchange for Chubby’s safety.

Just when it looked like things were about to wrap up, five new players dashed in to try and save the children, and the battle recommenced in earnest. Spells flew thick and fast from every direction, lighting up the dark room with flashes of light in every imaginable color save the acid green of the Killing Curse; nobody was pulling that one out just yet. Malfoy was temporarily Stunned, allowing Potter to try and dash off to the side after grabbing Chubby. I set to battling the pink-haired young woman who’d started firing off at me. She wasn’t a particularly experienced duelist (she was rather comically uncoordinated) but she put up a decent fight, not giving up until she had been knocked unconscious. I shoved her to the side so nobody would trip on her, and then immediately engaged with another newcomer.

The guy positively exuded desperation, throwing all of his energy into opposing me. He was only a slightly better combatant than Pink-Hair skill-wise, but while all her moves had been rather by-the-book, his style was more “Do every spell I can think of and hope something works.” It was harder to gauge what he was likely to do next, and he put a lot more force into his offensive than she had. He actually seemed to be almost enjoying the fight, somewhat, “Well, well. Look who it is,” he said, trying to disarm me and failing. “Can’t say I’m happy to see you considering that you clearly want to kill me, but…”

I snickered as he made an attempt to Stun me. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it, coz?”

“Not nearly long enough.” He laughed as well, dodging a Stunner from me, teasing, “Come on, you can do better than that!”

And so I did exactly that. Behind my adversary stood a dais topped with a curtained arch from which issued rather a lot of ghostly shrieks. I assumed that it was either a gateway to another dimension or to death itself. Whatever it was, I decided to try and send him through it and see what would happen, aiming the curse the instant I could get a clear shot to knock him directly into the curtain as Potter screamed, “Noooooooo!”

When I woke, it was pitch-dark outside; morning was still far off. As usual, I was laughing hysterically.

I’d had that same dream for months by the time I was kidnapped. The first time had been in October the night after James had told me, very loudly so everyone in the courtyard at the time could hear, “You know, Annabell, I bet your real parents were Death Eaters or something. They got sent to prison and that’s why you were given up for adoption, and also why you’re a psycho.” I had been so ticked off by that accusation that I beat him up in full view of everyone and got two months’ detention. 

The dream always followed the same basic plot: chasing the boy and his friends for possession of the glowing sphere-prophecy-thing, torturing one of the friends to coerce the boy into cooperation, and then fighting with people who suddenly showed up to defend the kids, eventually killing one of them. With each iteration, it seemed to gain a little more detail, but that night at the manor there was more new detail than usual. For the first time there was intelligible dialogue, and it was also the first time that any other people in the dream had names or definable faces. I found it quite odd that the two named individuals in the dream had been a Malfoy and a Potter, and that I’d been on the same side of the fight as the Malfoy. Even weirder was the fact that I’d dueled against someone who looked rather like Charlie. The ginger boy was a stereotypical Weasley, as was one of the girls, but I couldn’t place any of the other characters, even though several of them, like Dimwit and Chubby and the guy I killed, seemed vaguely familiar.

Since the first time I had it, I’d always been curious about what the content of the dream meant (other than that I was probably seriously messed up) and had wondered to a certain degree if the timing of its appearance in my life had any significance. Now that there were faces and names involved, I was doubly curious. A Potter was the closest thing I had to an enemy in my waking life as well as the dream, and I didn’t much care for his friends either, but nothing else seemed to have any connection to my current life circumstances. Especially not the bit about siding with a Malfoy and battling Charlie’s doppelganger.

Somewhat out of the blue, I remembered a brief discourse in Defense Against the Dark Arts class last year on the beginnings of the Second Wizarding War, the one where Harry Potter defeated Lord Voldemort for good. Both of Charlie’s parents fought in that war and they’d both nearly died. Anyway, it was a double period with the Gryffindors, because I recall sitting next to Charlie in the third row on the right and groaning at James because he was going on and on before class started about how heroic his father was. Professor Arlowe, as usual, tried to turn James’ bragging into a teachable moment.

“My dad was, like, the Chosen One. There was a prophecy and everything, saying how he was the only person who could beat Voldemort,” James crowed as (almost) all of the other students listened with rapt attention.

“That prophecy was much more trouble than it was worth,” said Arlowe. “Voldemort tried multiple times to send people under the Imperius curse to steal it, not yet knowing that the protection charm placed on items in the Hall of Prophecies only allows those who are mentioned in the prophecy to access them. One man was killed, another arrested, and a third gravely injured as a result of those attempts – and that was all before Voldemort tricked Harry Potter into going and finding it for him. That was quite the debacle; it was six teenagers up against ten or twelve Death Eaters until the Order of the Phoenix showed up to help, and the prophecy actually ended up getting smashed in all the scuffle. Almost nobody came out of the fight unhurt." That shut James up, and the lesson proceeded from there. We learned, rather fittingly, about counter-curses.

I’d never really thought much about that little narrative, but all of a sudden it hit me, at three in the morning at Malfoy Manor as I was trying to fall back to sleep: it was just like my dream: prophecy and outnumbered kids and all. Except from the opposite perspective. Which meant that my dream was almost certainly about that incident, from the point of view of one of the Death Eaters involved in the “debacle.” And as there was really only one active female Death Eater, it wasn’t difficult to guess exactly whose point of view it was from.


	7. In Which I Strike a Slightly Unfair Deal

As soon as I came to the realization that I had been dreaming about an actual historical occurrence through the eyes of a Death Eater, my mind went racing, trying to come up with a likely explanation why. Could the dream simply be a projection of James’ accusation about my birth parents onto a scenario that might have involved them if he was right, increasing in detail as I came across more circumstantial evidence about my heritage? An involuntary interest in thrilling events of times past, since my own life was so dreadfully boring? A fantasy in which I actually had the means and excuse to make suffer those people who didn’t like me, to be feared rather than laughed at? Or was it all of those things at once? At any rate, I comforted myself knowing that there were lots of ways that the dream could have come about that didn’t require my having a sordid past life.

For the rest of the night I slept fitfully, unable to shake the feeling that something bizarre might be afoot. Disjointed scenes flashed through my half-awake brain: something Professor McGonagall said last fall when I stopped by her office to ask how I should go about researching my biological family: “I believe that it’s in your best interest that you not pursue information about your birth parents right now. Please trust that I’m only trying to protect you.” A remark by Charlie’s grandmother to her daughter behind a closed kitchen door one afternoon when I was maybe seven: “There’s something extremely odd about that girl, Dora, and I know you know exactly what it is.” It seemed there were some things regarding my origins that certain people knew, and others perhaps suspected, that were being hidden from me and everyone else. Intentionally. But why? What sort of information could possibly merit such secrecy?

I opened my eyes at around six-thirty a.m., still dead exhausted but knowing I wasn’t likely to fall back asleep and stay asleep for any significant length of time, so I dragged myself out of bed. Since I was up early, I figured that I might as well see if I could leave before anyone else got up, so I pulled my sweater and jeans and sneakers and jacket out from where I’d hidden them the night before for safekeeping, in case Mrs. Malfoy had suggested that Buddy dispose of them, and quickly got dressed. Then I checked to see if I still had the map (I did, so I folded it and put it in the back pocket of my jeans) and French-braided my hair so it wouldn’t get all tangled during travel. By seven, I was downstairs unlocking the broom cabinet.

As I was debating which broom to take, I heard rather quick footsteps coming down the stairs, so I quickly grabbed one at random and dashed outside to take off before whoever it was had a chance to see me. I looped around the house and hid in the shrubbery for a couple of minutes just to be extra-careful, then set my course straight over the forest towards the village marked on the map. I’d done it; I’d finally gotten away from the Malfoys. The thought made me almost giddy with excitement, and I couldn’t help shouting into the wind, “Yes! I made it! Take that, losers! Whoo!”

“Wow, Anna. Your complete inability to be subtle is truly astounding,” someone said drily, from right above me. I screamed and nearly fell off the broom, I was so shocked to look up and see Stevie, flying casually not three feet from the top of my head. He swooped down right in front of me, forcing me to pull to an abrupt stop that also almost made me fall. “What are you doing out so early?”

Once I’d steadied myself, I stubbornly crossed my arms and said, “You know, I was just about to ask you the same question.”

He shrugged. “I woke up early, and I heard someone moving around so I went to go see who it was and noticed you hightailing it out the door with a broomstick, and since you’re you I knew you couldn’t be up to anything good so I followed you. You wouldn’t happen to be running away, would you?” Dumb question; what else would I be doing outside at dawn?

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. What’s it to you?” I asked testily.

“Nothing. I don’t personally care if you stick around or not. Things will definitely be a lot calmer with you gone. So go on if you want to; I’m not about to stop you.” Stevie pulled his broom off to the side and gestured for me to fly away.

I paused; could it really be that easy? “You’re letting me go? No catch whatsoever?” I asked in disbelief.

“Absolutely,” said Stevie. “Now, take that stolen broom and get out of here! Oh, and try not to think about what’ll happen when Astoria finds it missing. Or didn’t you know it belongs to her?” I didn’t, and he knew it. He probably hadn’t known either, before Scorpius pointed out whose broom was whose as they got stuff ready for one-on-one Quidditch. “It’s your chance to take. They probably won’t throw you in prison for theft. Probably.”

So there was a catch, after all. Wonderful. “Well. I don’t suppose there’s a broom sitting around I could take off on without anyone minding its absence, is there?” I sighed, turning around.

To my surprise, Stevie stopped me again and said, “There is one, actually, that they might not miss. Scorpius didn’t tell me it belonged to anyone specific. Maybe it’s just a spare?” Or the original owner was dead. “Anyway, if you’re really serious about leaving, we could swap brooms temporarily – I’m on my father’s right now– and I’d go trade Astoria’s out for that one and bring it back to you.” He was apparently just as eager for me to leave as I was, since he was offering to help me escape.

If the broom would get me away from the manor without getting me in trouble with the law, then I was all right with it. Even if it might have belonged to a dead guy. “I’ll do it.”

“Okay then, let’s both land and switch.” Stevie took a dive towards the ground, aiming for a clearing in the forest, and I followed him down. After we’d both dismounted, I handed him the broom I’d been on and he leaned Draco’s up on a tree. “Stay right here, and I’ll be back in just a couple minutes, then you can get on your way,” he instructed me as he began taking off, indicating a large rock I could sit on if I so desired. Just as he was about to clear the trees, he stopped and looped back down to ask, “Just out of curiosity, Anna, why are you so desperate to leave? I mean, I thought you hated school and would love more than anything to spend the holiday away.”

“Yeah, well, I hate being here more,” I snapped. “Now are you going to help me or not?”

“Yes, of course…do you hate it here because of all the stuff I said about you at dinner last night, or…?” he trailed off. Was it just a trick of the light, or did he look almost regretful? Turns out, he wasn’t actually. I should have known. “Or is it because of Narcissa? She thinks you’re someone from her past too, and that’s why she kidnapped you, right?” I nodded. “And who did she say you were, may I ask?”

It occurred to me that we were both in the same rather awkward position with Mrs. Malfoy; he alone wouldn’t think it was ridiculous if I told him the truth. “Her sister.”

“Well, she thinks I’m her husband. I think that’s worse.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” I said, shaking my head. “Her sister was Bellatrix Lestrange.”

“Bellatrix Lestrange, huh? The mad Death Eater who…didn’t she kill your uncle?” I shrugged; after all, it hadn’t been my real uncle who was murdered. Just my adopted mother’s sister’s muggle-born husband. I’d never even met him; he’d died years before I came along, but I’d seen pictures. He’d been sort of funny-looking, in my opinion. “Ouch. No wonder you want to leave so badly,” Stevie said, although he was sort of grinning when he said it, which was quite annoying.

“What are you smiling at?” I demanded.

Still looking quite amused, he said, “Oh, nothing. Just…it isn’t exactly an unfair comparison, if you know what I mean.” I did. And I didn’t appreciate it. Not that I’d expected Stevie to tell me otherwise. He’d never lie to make me feel better. To his credit, though, he did hastily add, “It’s still a completely nonsense idea, of course.”

“Nice save.”

With a smirk, Stevie said, “Well, I didn’t want you getting cross and killing me way out here where nobody would be able to hear me scream.” I shot him a dirty look. Furious would not begin to describe how I felt about him in that moment. Maybe I was just really tired, but I was not in the mood to hear him or anybody else make jokes about me killing people. Not that I could avoid it; it was more or less an everyday occurrence for me. “What? I was kidding. I know you wouldn’t actually...”

“Just go!” I screamed, pointing back in the direction of the manor, on the verge of tears. “Go get me that broom so I can get out of here already! Away from you!” At once, Stevie’s expression softened. He landed the broom and propped it against a tree. “Didn’t you hear me? Go!”

Frustratingly, Stevie didn’t go. Instead, he walked over back towards me, even as I started hurling sticks at him to try and get him to leave. Sitting down on the rock and looking up at me appraisingly, he said “So you are still mad at me about what I said last night. Aren’t you? All that stuff about not being able to stand you and not being able to envision you having friends…or feelings…” suddenly he trailed off, looking slightly uncomfortable. “You know, I can see how you wouldn’t like hearing that sort of thing not too long after you’d been told someone thinks you’re just like someone like Bellatrix Lestrange.”

“I don’t like hearing it ever,” I reminded him. “That’s why I get mad at you every time you say that sort of thing, believe it or not.”

“Yeah, I sort of gathered that after you chucked that knife at me,” he said. After a brief pause, he asked, “So you want to leave here, where I’m the only person who talks that way about you, and go back to school, where basically everybody does it? That makes perfect sense.” He had me there. Escape certainly wasn’t a logical choice if I wanted to avoid being made fun of, but I’m not all that into making choices based on logic. I generally just rationalize what I choose to do after the fact. It saves an unbelievable amount of time.

“It’s the principle of the thing. I was kidnapped, and now I want to be un-kidnapped,” I explained. It was the best reason I had for leaving – really what other reason would there be?

Not even seeming to hear me, Stevie continued giving reasons why I should maybe consider staying at the manor. Why he was doing that, I didn’t know, but he made some pretty compelling points. “Also, if you stay here you get to pretend you’re not poor, and you can’t deny you like that. And unlike at school, nobody here gives you funny looks across the room when they hear you, say…giggling like a maniac at around three in the morning…”

My mouth fell open in shock. “Did you…”

Stevie nodded. “I’d be surprised if anyone didn’t hear you, that’s how loud it was.”

“Well, that’s just…great.” I really hoped that he was wrong and everyone else had been too fast asleep to hear me. With a sigh of resignation, I said, “Go ahead then, Stevie. Tell me what a freak I am.”

“Annalise Doyle, I have known you practically all my life. I can tell you without a single doubt that you are the single freakiest person I have ever met and had the misfortune of being forced by my cheapskate adoptive mother to share not one but eight lousy birthday parties with,” Stevie declared theatrically, standing up. “That said, I think you should know that the maniacal laughter I heard wasn’t quite as terrifying as the Hogwarts rumor mill would have people believe. But maybe that’s because I’ve known you for so long that I’m just more used to your weirdness than the average person.”

Either way, it was the closest thing to legitimately nice that he’d been to me in a very long time. At least since primary school. “This wouldn’t happen to be your way of saying I’m not really so bad, would it?” I teased.

“Of course not. You’re still a singularly awful human being,” Stevie said, smirking. He stood up. “Now, shall I go get that broom for you so you can finish running away and I can spend the next few days here enjoying the peace and quiet that comes with being somewhere you aren’t, or what?”

“Wait, weren’t you just trying to talk me out of running away?” I asked, slightly confused as to what, if anything, Stevie was trying to influence me to think or do regarding my escape. He shrugged somewhat guiltily, which I took as a yes. “So would you prefer I stayed, or left? And why do you even care, anyway?” Not that I’d take his opinion into account; I was just curious why, if he claimed I was so bad, he might not want me gone.

“I already told you I don’t care,” Stevie said after a moment, “Whether you leave or not I get some sort of benefit. On one hand, you’re extremely annoying and I would quite enjoy not having you around. But on the other…well, let’s just say that you mentioning earlier that you’d been compared to the infamously, fanatically evil Bellatrix Lestrange made me realize that you staying, precisely because you’re such a bother, might just make me look better by comparison. And my father is so far in denial that I think I’m going to need all the help I can get to make him like me and acknowledge me as part of the family. Which, of course, is something I want more than anything else, even more than I want you gone.” He spoke nonchalantly, but was unable to keep a note of desperation from creeping into his voice.

“There had better be something in it for me if I stay,” I said, crossing my arms resolutely over my chest. “What if, as long as I’m here, you don’t insult me or try to make me look bad in front of anyone – except Draco, of course. And even then I’m not sure you’ll need to, since I don’t think I need a whole lot of help making him not like me, so…let’s just say don’t be mean to me at all if I stay. Deal?”

Stevie hesitated – he clearly didn’t want to have to be nice to me – but eventually his desperate need for acceptance won out and he said, “Fine. Deal. So you’ll stay?”

“Let me think about it…” It was really a simple choice. I absolutely hated being constantly mocked at school, so I’d take any and every break from it I could negotiate, even only a very short one, even if it meant staying kidnapped and putting up with the annoyances of the Malfoys for a few days. “Yeah, I’ll stay.”

Though he tried hard not to show it, I could tell Stevie was very, very happy that I had agreed to try and help him impress Draco and possibly achieve his greatest wish (although from what I’d seen, Stevie’s chances of actually getting Draco to like him well enough to let him use the family name and/or move into the manor were at best very slim). “All right, then.” he said, going over to where he’d propped both brooms against a tree and handing me Astoria’s before getting on Draco’s and lifting off. “Now that’s settled, let’s get back to the house. I haven’t had any breakfast yet, have you?”

I hadn’t given any thought to food since I was so wrapped up in escaping, but now that he mentioned it, I was kind of hungry. And cold. The light morning mist had turned slowly into a drizzle, just light enough to not easily be felt in the middle of heated discussion but wet enough to turn my sweater into an uncomfortable wet mass of wool. I didn’t even want to think about what the damp meant for my hair. If I hadn’t put it up, I’m sure it would have been next to impossible to untangle. In any case, as I took off after Stevie, I found myself almost eager to be back at the manor if only to get out of the rain. Especially since it started pouring so hard I could barely see just as we passed the stone wall separating the gardens from the forest.

“There you two are,” said Draco crossly when we came back into the entrance hall. “What were you doing out flying in this weather? You’re both soaked! I really hope you haven’t tracked any mud onto the rug. It was a wedding present from my in-laws, and I’m already in hot water with them – no thanks to you, Steven – so I really don’t want to see it ruined, they’d probably kill me. And what on Earth are you doing with my wife’s new broom, Annalise?”

“She was trying to run away,” Stevie explained, stepping gingerly off the rug the instant Draco mentioned it. “I saw her sneaking out and I followed her and brought her back. She had no idea whose broom it was she had taken, so…yes. Everything’s good now, Dad, so I’ll just go and…”

“For the last time, Steven, I am not your father!” snapped Draco.

Stevie, correctly discerning that talking back to Draco would not accomplish anything at the moment, especially not on that particular matter, simply gave him a stubborn “this isn’t over yet” look and then left the room without a word. I, on the other hand, refused to drop the subject so easily. “Who do you think you’re fooling? Of course you’re his father. Anyone can see it.”

Looking at me with an expression of deep loathing – very pinch-faced and cold-eyed, with distinct overtones of wishing he had never had the misfortune of meeting me or perhaps even wishing something awful would happen to me so he’d never have to see me again – Draco said firmly, “No, I am not.” And then, after a beat, “Go away.”

That, obviously, didn’t satisfy me. “I suppose you have another explanation for why he looks just like you, then? You can’t deny there’s a strong family resemblance.”

“I’m not denying anything. I know Steven looks just like me,” he said curtly. He appeared to be trying very hard not to lose his cool. “But he isn’t my son. I never cheated on Astoria and never would. I love her.”

“So you say.”

Draco’s infuriated glare about doubled in intensity, but managed to keep his voice relatively calm. “Annalise, you happen to be in the unique position of being the absolute last person on Earth I would ever want to be discussing this with and I know you know it’s none of your business. But I can tell that you’ve decided for some odd reason to make it your business and also that, like my wife, you’ll never drop the subject unless I explain myself to you, so please listen carefully: since getting married sixteen years ago, I have never, I repeat never been with another woman besides Astoria. The fact that I have stuck to that story since Christmas despite so much pressure from my wife to admit otherwise should attest to its truth, because if it weren’t true I would have given in to the pressure and begged for forgiveness months ago. I don’t care if you don’t believe me on that, but I swear it’s all true.”

Everyone knows that the Malfoys are all very good (almost compulsive) liars who will say anything to preserve their reputations. But I supposed that people believing that Draco had an affair when he really hadn’t was just as bad as him actually having the affair, so either way his reputation was equally shot whether he lied or told the truth. I decided just for curiosity’s sake to at least pretend to give him the benefit of the doubt and see where that led. “All right, supposing you’re telling the truth. What does that mean about Steven?”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing since I met him,” Draco muttered irascibly. “Looking at the boys, the only thing you could think is that they’re brothers, that’s how alike they look, but they aren’t. They can’t be. And yet…what else could they be?” With a deep sigh, he said, “Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of that maybe my mother is right about Steven – it makes sense enough to look closer at, at least.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “She thinks Stevie is your father, turned back into a child by some impossible piece of magic! If you believe that, then you must either be so impossibly desperate to keep your dirty little secrets that you’ll accept any explanation of the situation that doesn’t involve you in any way…or you’re losing it, cracking under the pressure of keeping said secrets and keeping face. In either case, it makes you look very guilty of the very thing you keep swearing up and down that you never did.”

Again, Draco sighed. “That is what it looks like, isn’t it?” he said miserably.

“Oh, yeah,” I snickered. “You’re completely screwed. You might as well just confess to everyone now and save yourself the trouble of Stevie bugging you about it later.” I then turned on my heel and began heading upstairs, wincing at the awful squelching noise made by my drenched shoes on the floor.

“I have nothing to confess, because I did nothing wrong” Draco maintained stubbornly, the sour look of detestation returning to his face. “And what’s more, Annalise, the magic required for my mother’s theory to be true actually isn’t impossible. I checked, last week. There is a potion in existence – illegal, of course – that has the power to turn a person of any age back into an infant. It’s a relatively new discovery, not confirmed until about two years ago, but research has been looking into the concept for, probably not coincidentally, about fifteen.”


	8. In Which Stevie Gets in Over His Head

An illegal potion with the ability to do exactly what Mrs. Malfoy thought had happened to her husband and Bellatrix had been allegedly invented just in time to make it happen fifteen years ago? That was simply too convenient, and therefore undoubtedly a lie, so I ignored Draco and continued on my way. There was no way I was going to bother even thinking twice about the idea. The drafty halls of the manor made me shiver in my drenched clothes (and it didn’t help in the least that the portraits kept speculating that I would get pneumonia and die from being out in the rain); I was quite eager to get them off and take a very long, hot bath before setting to unsnarling and de-frizzing my hair. But it turned out that Stevie had stopped on the second-floor landing to listen in to me haranguing Draco, and he wasn’t at all happy about what he’d heard. “Well, thanks for completely messing that up,” he spat. “Now he’s never going to come around.”

I snorted and kept walking. “He never would have and you know it.”

Just like he had when I was trying to escape, Stevie wouldn’t let me keep going until I continued the conversation to his satisfaction; he raced up to cut me off halfway between the second and third floors. “I cannot believe he’s claiming that his mother could be right rather than coming forward with a truth so plain that he’s got absolutely no chance of keeping it hidden from anyone – except his mother, but only because she isn’t really in her right mind,” he said, shaking his head disgustedly. “What could he possibly hope to accomplish by supporting such an inconceivable idea?”

“Maybe he’s hoping to get you so frustrated at his evasiveness that you’ll give up and never bother him again,” I suggested, trying and failing to get around him. “I mean, really. Even if you could make him admit that he’s your dad, do you actually think he’d ever welcome you in with open arms? Because he wouldn’t. He’s clearly trying to block everything about his little…ahem, misadventure all those years ago out of his memory so he can pretend it never happened – and he can’t very well do that if you’re hanging around as tangible evidence of it. He wants you out of his life, not further into it.”

Though he probably knew in the back of his mind that was true, Stevie stubbornly refused to consider that he had no hope of becoming accepted as a Malfoy, not if Draco had anything to say about it. Pigheaded denial seems to run in the family. “He only thinks that’s what he wants. I’ll show him how wrong he is, whatever it takes. I’ll show him I belong here.”

“The only thing you’re likely to show him is that you’re a nuisance.”

Stevie gave me a hard, determined look. “I’ll make him want me somehow. I have to,” he said firmly. “This is my real family, and I need to be a part of it.”

“Technically you’re part of it whether anyone likes it or not,” I reminded him. “You’re just unfortunately one of those shameful parts that no one ever speaks of, and there’s nothing you can do because you were born into it. Like Charlie.” When Stevie looked confused at the mention of my best friend, I explained, “Her grandmum was a pureblood from a really rich and influential family. Actually, she’s Mrs. Malfoy’s sister. The other one. But she married a mudblood, and then her only daughter married Professor Lupin, and so that whole side of the family is basically a nonentity as far as the Malfoys are concerned. Charlie and Scorpius are second cousins, but they’ll probably never know. Long story short, Charlie can’t help being on the wrong branch of an esteemed family tree and neither can you, and neither can I – because face it, if anyone’s existence was a mistake, it would be mine.”

Stevie couldn’t help but smile a little bit at that, “Yeah, it probably would be.” But then he got serious again. “This is going to sound weird, Anna – so please don’t laugh – but the very first time I set foot in this house, last December, it just felt…right, somehow. Like coming home after a long time away. And I knew that if I belong anywhere at all, it’s here.”

“That’s…um, interesting.” The thought briefly crossed my mind that if Mrs. Malfoy was in fact right (which she wasn’t) and I’d once been her sister and Stevie had once been her husband, it would make sense that he might be able to inexplicably recognize the manor as his home. He could have a subconscious memory of having lived there all his life if I could relive being a Death Eater in my sleep. Or, more likely, he was just obsessed with the wealth and prestige of the people he’d figured out were his biological relatives so much that he felt it should be his as well. But it still gave me shivers how well so many things lined up for Mrs. Malfoy’s theory to seem almost (but not quite) plausible…or maybe that was just chilly air wafting through the upper halls.

“It’s one hundred percent true,” Stevie maintained, as if I didn’t believe him. “So you see why this is so important to me?”

“Yeah, sure.” The longer I stood in one place talking, the colder I got. And I was getting a bit sick of discussing Stevie’s daddy issues with him anyway, so I moved to quickly wrap up the conversation. “Well, I’m soaked through. And my hair’s undoubtedly a tangled mess – I can feel it frizzing! I really should fix it before it gets any worse. Good luck figuring out what to do about Draco!” Stevie gave a small nod of thanks, and I darted off up the stairs. He soon followed suit.

Once I got back to my rooms, I didn’t come out again till lunchtime (I had Buddy bring me some eggs and toast and tea for my breakfast; he’s really quite a useful little creature). Most of my time was spent in the bathroom, taking a bath and then working on my hair, which by some miracle – and an awful lot of leave-in conditioner – actually turned out after about an hour to be reasonably workable and barely frizzy at all. It was even kind of shiny, which almost never happens. I was in awe, frankly, of how good it ended up looking. I’d known it most likely had potential since being shown that picture of Bellatrix during her school years, not much older than me and singularly striking. And though I tried, I couldn’t honestly deny that my looks were quite alike to hers, which could only mean I was capable of being similarly attractive. Even knowing that, the final result quite exceeded even my wildest expectations.

After getting dressed (in a cashmere sweater, no less!) I ventured downstairs to see if I couldn’t locate the boys (I was determined not to let them play Quidditch and ignore me all day if I could help it) and found them in the kitchen. Stevie was going back and forth between arguing with Draco and supervising Buddy in the preparation of sandwiches for himself and Scorpius, which resulted in a rather fragmented conversation: “You’re going about this all wrong!...No, not you, Buddy – you just keep doing what you’re doing, but with less cheese…flat-out denial isn’t going to help anything and you know it! If I’m not your son, prove it…now go ahead and toast it…I’ll never believe it unless you prove it…” and so on.

No one noticed me come in for several seconds; Scorpius, who’d been silently watching his father and brother going at each other was the first to detect my arrival. “Oh, hi, Anna. I didn’t see you there,” he said cheerily. “You look really nice. How are you today?”

“I’m okay,” I said. Gesturing with my head in the direction of Stevie and Draco, I asked, “So how long have they been bickering like that?”

Scorpius shrugged, looking forlornly at his irate family members. “I don’t know. A while. I haven’t looked at the time for a few minutes, but I hope it ends soon because it isn’t going anywhere. They just keep saying the same things over and over; neither one is actually listening to the other at all.” Giving me a pleading look, he asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have any idea how to get them to stop, would you?”

Did I look like the sort of person who knows anything about conflict resolution? “Other than set the kitchen on fire to force them to work together to put it out, nope. Not a clue.”

“I figured as much.” Scorpius grimaced. “Guess I just have to wait it out. At least it looks like Buddy’s finished with my sandwich. I could ask him to make you one now, Anna, or would you like something else for lunch?” He gestured vaguely towards a rather shaken-looking Buddy, who had, with great relief to be done trying to decipher Stevie’s disjointed orders, just put both of the sandwiches he’d been making on plates for the boys and had set to tidying up the kitchen a bit, which allowed Stevie to turn all of his focus on trying to get through to Draco.

I would have said yes to the sandwich, but just as I was about to, the argument took a rather interesting turn. Now without distraction and able to think about his response more clearly, Stevie suddenly said something he maybe should have thought of bringing up a while ago, just to see how Draco would respond: “So you say I’m not your son. You then say you accept a theory about me which your delusional mother initially thought up and which I won’t mention in this present mixed company. Okay. Whatever. I don’t get how that’s possible, but I’m going to ignore that for the moment and ask just this one question of you: What exactly would it mean if I decided to believe you – which, just so we’re clear, I have not?”

It didn’t appear that Draco had expected Stevie to have any interest at all in the implications of any side of the argument but his own. He was totally caught off guard and already in a bad temper, even more so as he struggled for words, finally snapping, “You know perfectly well what it would mean!”

“I don’t – what are they talking about?” Scorpius whispered. I shushed him. If he was allowed to know what was going on, someone other than me would fill him in.

“I think you misunderstand the question, sir,” said Stevie respectfully. “I know what you’re trying to persuade me of, true, but what I don’t know is what you would want of me if I lost my mind and decided you weren’t lying about not being my father. After all, it would be quite unfair to me, if you and your mother turned out to be right, to expect me to leave here and never associate myself with this family again. If you really wanted to never see me, you’d admit I’m your son by a woman other than your wife but that you couldn’t ever acknowledge me because your wife wouldn’t have it.”

Stevie had always been very good at making tricky and compelling debate points, but that was probably the best trap he had ever laid. It left Draco quite flustered to have been so nearly outwitted by a teenager; all the color drained from his face for a moment as he stared, dumbfounded, at a smirking Stevie. He regained composure quickly enough, though, and calmly replied, “You’re absolutely right, Steven, to say it would be easier by far on me and on this family to tell you what you seem to want to hear and admit that everyone’s suspicions are true. But I will not have Astoria think I cheated on her when I did nothing of the sort. So, as for expectations: if anything ever manages to persuade you to believe my position, I would expect you first of all to help me convince her to believe it as well if she doesn’t already, and then we can go from there.”

Now it was Stevie’s turn to be shocked. “So you actually do think that your mother’s ridiculous ideas are true?” he asked, eyes wide with disbelief.

“Any doubt I had, you just put out,” said Draco solemnly.

“Well then, you’re as crazy as she is,” Stevie sneered, but his words didn’t have malice enough to be entirely convincing. He wanted to be a Malfoy far too badly to slight Draco and really mean it, a fact he confirmed by agreeing to Draco’s terms (or at least pretending to). “But I can live with crazy. And if I could talk the most stubborn person I know out of stealing a broom and hightailing it away from here early this morning, I’m sure I can get your wife to come around,” he said confidently.

“Does this mean you’re admitting I could be right?” Draco asked with a smirk.

Stevie shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

“All right then.” Draco’s smirk widened very slightly. He could tell that Stevie was faking belief just to get what he wanted. “Could you tell that to my mother, please?”

At once, Stevie’s face assumed an unmistakable deer-in-the-headlights expression. He was trapped and he knew it. “Y-your mother?” he stammered. Draco nodded, and Stevie’s resolve began to crumble. “I mean, I suppose she would have a right to know that I agree with you, but I…yes, of course I’ll tell your mother,” he stammered, heading towards the door.

“Sell-out,” I coughed into my hand. He shot me a dirty look. “What? I know you want this more than anything, but you of all people should know it’s not worth your dignity, which is what you’ll lose if you get into all this craziness.”

“And what does someone like you know of dignity?” Stevie asked.

“I know how to protect my last shreds of it,” I said fiercely. “And I thought you agreed you wouldn’t insult me any more while we were here.”

“That wasn’t an insult, it was an honest question,” Stevie shot back, then picked up his plated sandwich and an apple and headed towards the door into the dining room. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s something I need to go…” He stopped short, having nearly run straight into Mrs. Malfoy. I heard a nervous gulp; he went quite red in the face and suddenly looked like the last place on Earth he wanted to be was in the kitchen with her and the rest of us. “Sorry, I…I think I’m going to be sick.” And with that, he dropped his plate and sprinted out of the room, slamming the door before the sandwich even hit the floor.

Poor Mrs. Malfoy really didn’t know what to make of what had just happened: she walked into a room and Stevie left after five seconds, looking like he wanted to vomit. Not exactly the greeting she wanted from him. “What was that about?”

Scorpius shrugged. “I have no idea. He might have something he needs to tell you, or he might not. I’m not exactly sure, he was being sort of weird about it. So was Dad. They were arguing. I don’t know exactly what about – something about what it would mean if Dad were right and Steven isn’t really my brother – but I think Dad just won.”

His grandmother nodded. I think, based on the way she responded, that she understood at least kind of what Scorpius was talking about. “Well, if it was something important he needed to say to me I’m sure he’ll say it sooner or later. I’d prefer sooner, but I’m not going anywhere,” she said breezily. Though she was addressing Scorpius – and to a slightly lesser extent, Draco – her eyes kept coming back to me. “He’ll come around eventually. They all will. Him and Annalise and even Astoria. I can feel it,” she added to reassure herself. Draco looked doubtful but said nothing.

“Will someone please tell me what’s going on with Steven, what you want him to come around to?” Scorpius begged. “If he’s not my brother, he’s still my best friend.”

Draco and Mrs. Malfoy looked at each other nervously; he gave an almost imperceptible shrug to suggest “maybe we should fill him in, just a little,” she pouted disapprovingly, and he sighed. He didn’t want to oppose his mother. “Not now, Scorpius,” he told his son resignedly.

For the first time in my (admittedly quite short) experience with him, the seemingly always even-keeled Scorpius lost his cool. “I’m sick of all of these secrets and lies! Nobody tells me anything anymore! Don’t you trust me, Dad? I’m your own kid!” he whined, then pointed an accusing finger at me. “Why can she know and not me?” When neither his father nor his grandmother answered him, he stormed out of the room. “All I want is for my own family to get along and be honest with me – is that really so hard?”

“For the record, secrets and lies are a proud family tradition!” Mrs. Malfoy called after him.

Her son shook his head ashamedly. “This is just going from bad to worse,” he groaned, then took off after Scorpius. “Son, wait! I can explain!”

“Don’t you dare let anything slip!” commanded Mrs. Malfoy, taking off after Draco. If only for the entertainment value of watching a sixty-five year old woman running and trying to catch up with her much more agile son and grandson, I followed Mrs. Malfoy at a somewhat leisurely pace through the dining room and into the entry hall to where she stopped to catch her breath at the bottom of the main staircase. “Draco, please! Don’t ruin this for me!”

Upon hearing that, Draco – by that time almost at the second floor – looked back at his mother and said furiously, “I’m not trying to ruin anything! I’m just trying to keep the peace around here, no thanks to you and your little kidnapping stunt!” before continuing after his son.

As I was beginning to gather she routinely did when stressed, Mrs. Malfoy collapsed onto the banister and started crying. “All I wanted was to bring my family back together and it’s been nothing but disaster! And it’s all my fault!” she wailed, then broke into a bout of convulsive sobbing that shook her whole body.

“Yep, pretty much.” I stepped around her, onto the stairs. “And you cry way too much, did you know that?” which of course only made her sob harder.

She whimpered something largely unintelligible; my best interpretation was something along the lines of, “I think I’ve managed to make everyone here angry with me, and I never meant to upset anyone!”

Her bawling and sniveling was really very irritating, but I tried to ignore her. Halfway up the flight, though, I gave up on that and turned to ask, “What? Did you expect me to help you or something? Take pity on you because of all of this pathetic weeping you’re doing?” She looked up at me miserably, which I took as a yes. “Well, I’m not going to. It’s not my problem. Plus, you really wouldn’t want my help.” And not because I don’t help people I don’t like, although it’s true that I don’t. Because I can’t solve problems worth my life. Not my own problems, and especially not other people’s.

“I know,” Mrs. Malfoy said dolefully. “I know you couldn’t tell me a thing about how to handle the boys even if you wanted to. But at least tell me this: What do I do about you? I know you tried to run away this morning, and that Steven dragged you back here, so…I’ll take you back to Hogwarts if that’s truly what you want. I’ll do anything if it’ll get you to forgive me. Absolutely anything. I swear.”

“Well, lucky for you, you don’t need to take me back,” I announced. Mrs. Malfoy pulled herself up off the floor and looked at me, mouth agape in jubilant disbelief, as I explained. “Stevie didn’t drag me anywhere. I decided, (somewhat) of my own free will, not to go through with running away. And I’m more or less satisfied with my decision so far, because if I hadn’t stayed I would have been flying in the rain for hours without any breakfast. And also, here I get to pretend I’m not poor and horribly unpopular.” I didn’t bother to mention the deal I’d made with Stevie to stick around and help him suck up to Draco if he promised to be nice to me, since it really wasn’t important any more seeing as it seemed impossible for Steven and Draco to come to like each other. “So I suppose you’re stuck with me for the next couple of days.”

“You won’t regret not having left,” Mrs. Malfoy promised, perking up a bit.

I nodded to acknowledge her comment and continued: “As for forgiving you for kidnapping me, well…I think you’re just going to have to settle for tolerance for the time being, until I’ve made up my mind whether or not I like you,” I said decisively. “Right now, I have mixed feelings: I still think you’re completely out of your mind, but I have to admit you put an awful lot of effort into trying to understand me and make me happy, which is more than I can say of a lot of other people and I can’t help but sort of appreciate it.”

“I can live with sort of,” said Mrs. Malfoy with an emphatic nod. She paused a moment, then added, “You know, speaking of pretending you aren’t poor and horribly unpopular, when I first walked into the kitchen, in the half-second before Steven…um, left, I was going to say that you look absolutely beautiful today, Annalise. Someone who didn’t know you would hardly be able to tell that you weren’t raised in a proper pureblood family!”

Though I knew her opinion of me was probably sort of colored by her equating me with Bellatrix, who had been raised in a proper pureblood family (and a lot of good it had done her!), it was still quite a valuable compliment to me. I liked looking like I came from money, instead of like I couldn’t afford conditioner – which I could, just not the really good stuff that my hair seems to require in order to behave itself all day. And also, no one had used the word “beautiful” to describe me since Christmas, and even then that had been my mum who’d used it and so it didn’t really count, especially since when she had said it I had just pulled on one of Aunt Susan’s sweaters and I had a really bad case of bedhead. A lot of my peers – and a few bitter adults like Aunt Susan – consider me funny-looking on account of my hair. “Thanks. I…thanks.”

Mrs. Malfoy smiled. “You’re quite welcome.” Noticing how particularly flattered I was – I was still thinking about how nice it was to be called beautiful by someone I barely knew – she gave a light little laugh. “You don’t get many compliments, do you?”

“Nope. Not unless you count routinely being called a psycho freak.” In that case, I was the most admired girl at school.

“Annalise, you absolutely break my heart.” she said, still quite emotional. Funny, my mother used to say that a lot, back when I actually told her things (I stopped when I realized she couldn’t solve any of my major problems). For several seconds, Mrs. Malfoy stood, leaning lightly on the banister and looking sadly at me, probably wishing that it was possible for her money to fix my social problems…then suddenly her face brightened. “I’ve just had an idea.” I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. In my experience, her ideas never turned out well. “Oh, come on, Annalise, don’t give me that look – you don’t even know what it is yet! Please just hear me out. Please?”

With a sigh, I said, “Fine, out with it: what’s the idea?”

“Well, I was thinking that we need to find some way to inspire some self-confidence in you, since – and don’t take this the wrong way – you don’t seem to have any.”

That was entirely untrue; after all, it wasn’t as if I really believed all of the awful things people said about me. If I did, I wouldn’t bother beating on James when I heard him making fun of me. I just...took all of the insults to heart and sometimes wondered if I should believe them. Which, I realized, was nearly as bad. Was I pathetic or what? “I assume you think you know how to do that for me?”

“I think I know how to try. I’d like to – but only if you agree, of course – teach you how to act in accordance with the place in society you technically should occupy. You are pureblood – I know you believe at least that, of everything I’ve told you – and you should start acting like you believe it. It’s all in the attitude, really, something I know you have in abundance. All you need is a lesson in how to use it to your best advantage, which is something I have always done well.” I supposed that could be true, but I seriously doubted it would cause any marked improvement in my reputation. Almost no one cared anything for blood status at Hogwarts, so I’d get mocked no matter what. “You come from one of the most dignified families in all of wizard-kind – you’ve got to realize, the problem isn’t with you, it’s with everyone else! You deserve far better than to be treated like a nobody! You shouldn’t have to stand for such abuse!”

The “most dignified family” bit was probably an exaggeration or a delusion, but Mrs. Malfoy was right that I was putting up with a lot more crap from people than I should. “If you think you can somehow help me do that…well, I haven’t much else to do here, so I have no good reason not to let you try.” I think Mrs. Malfoy just about exploded with joy when she heard that. She definitely squealed like a twelve year old girl whose crush had just talked to her for the first time. I was definitely getting in over my head – oh, well. “When do we start?”

“Start what?” Stevie asked, coming up behind us.

I couldn’t help but shriek.“Stevie! Where did you come from?” Mrs. Malfoy was quite startled as well, though if she made any noise it was drowned out by me. 

He gestured across the hall with a shrug. “The library. I was…doing a little thinking, about what I want to do as far as…well, you know, Anna. And about what you said about whether it was worth jeopardizing my dignity just to get the acceptance I’ve yearned for my whole life and…well, I realized it totally is. I’m sure you’d agree if you were in my position.” I’d like to say I wouldn’t, but he was probably right. If I really wanted something as much as he wanted to be a Malfoy, I’d do absolutely anything, even if it might be perceived as ridiculous. Stevie then turned to Mrs. Malfoy and said, somewhat formally, “I really am sorry I ran out of the room earlier. I was being put on the spot, and I choked at a really inopportune moment. So I suppose I should tell you, as far as, um… me, I actually do think that your, um, idea is …you know, I still can’t bring myself to say it. I am so sorry, but whether it’s possible or not – and it isn’t, I’m not going to lie – the idea absolutely disgusts me.” And with that, he breezed past Mrs. Malfoy and up the stairs. “The rain’s let up, I’m going to see if Scorpius wants to play some Quidditch.”

“I…I disgust him?” Mrs. Malfoy asked herself dazedly, blinking very fast to try and stop the tears from coming. And then, with more finality, “I disgust him. I can’t believe, I thought he was close to…” Before she finished the sentence she began bawling again, collapsing onto the nearest object that would support her, which was unfortunately me. “I can’t take the rejection, Bella!” she sobbed, burying her head in my shoulder.

“Please let go of me.” I tried to step back and peel her off of me, but although most of her was quite limp, she had a death grip on my shirt. I really hoped tears didn’t stain. “Seriously – go cry on Draco or something.” Nothing. I sighed and shuffled her over to the drawing room, where I was finally able to pry her loose and deposit her on a sofa. “You're pathetic. Did you know that? Oh, and seriously, never call me Bella again. My name is Annalise.”

Because her head was buried in a pillow, I couldn’t make out what her response to that was. Hopefully it was, “Sorry, Annalise, I won’t,” but I doubted it.


	9. In Which My Reeducation Begins

Draco managed to get Scorpius to calm down easily enough without letting slip anything that might upset his mother. He only said that the boys were definitely not blood brothers and as for what they were, he said it was a little unclear, that he was still trying to piece things together himself and his mother had an idea that was a bit unlikely and Stevie didn’t like it very much. And that was apparently explanation enough for Scorpius, except he tried to get Stevie to corroborate it and Stevie wouldn’t say a word on the subject, which Scorpius found rather frustrating. But he didn’t dwell on it. When I asked him why, he just said, “Steven’s confused, because who wouldn’t be in his spot? He just needs some time to sort things out, and I can’t be mad about that.” That’s dear little Scorpius for you.

Tensions among the various members of the Malfoy family stayed high for at least the rest of my stay at the manor. In fact, Stevie more or less refused to talk to anyone except for Scorpius (and occasionally me, but as he found that the best way to keep his end of our little deal and not insult me was to avoid me, his words to me were few and far between); if he had anything to say to Draco or Mrs. Malfoy, he told Scorpius to say it. However angry he was, though, he continued winning more time at the manor for himself in nightly chess games against Draco. Scorpius seemed to slightly resent acting as Stevie’s mouth because he really didn’t want to take sides in a spat between his father and his best friend, and thanks to his grandmother’s comment about secrets and lies being a family tradition he began acting a bit leery towards her. Not that she noticed at all, because she was such an absolute wreck on account of Stevie. She more or less holed herself up in her room for the rest of the day, moping. I didn’t see her at all from the time I deposited her in the drawing room until she dragged herself out for dinner. The only Malfoy who seemed not to be upset was Draco, because Stevie wasn’t in his face any more. I have to admit, I wasn’t in terrible spirits either. Not that I was happy – I just wasn’t miserable any more. And all the drama was kind of entertaining.

While the rain held off, I spent most of my day outside in the garden reading and watching Stevie running Scorpius ragged with endless rounds of Quidditch. He played with an intense, single-minded determination that poor Scorpius could barely keep up with (which is why the kid threatened to quit about every five minutes but, having nothing else to do, couldn’t bring himself to). And he won every match, not even needing to cheat. It was, I think, the only thing at the manor that still made perfect sense to him. Finding out that Draco truly believed his mother had really shaken him. It had shaken me, too, because Draco had seemed almost reluctant to admit that he no longer thought his mother’s ideas were pure delusion, like believing her was not a choice he had wanted to make – he’d rather stick to calling her crazy – but an inescapable conclusion. And I wanted nothing more than to escape that conclusion. I still firmly maintained that it was all an impossible fantasy, but I couldn’t shake the question in the back of my mind, the same one Stevie had asked earlier: what if it’s real? Neither could I rid myself of the growing fear that it just might be.

Late in the afternoon, just as I was about to get to the end of my book and Scorpius was on the verge of possibly winning or at the very least tying a match, it started pouring again. This time, though, the rain didn’t let up for over two days. Needless to say, everyone got pretty stir-crazy pretty quickly. Especially the boys, whose disappointment in being unable to play outside eventually resulted in their attempting to play Quidditch in the ballroom while Draco panicked over how they were bound to break something. There were several near misses, but all the chandeliers stayed intact at least (I’m sure Stevie never would have forgiven himself if that weren’t the case; his admiration for the house hadn’t changed at all). Until I shattered one while attempting to make a flaming rocket out of a bottle of old brandy – then Draco had a conniption.

What can I say? Boredom always makes me do weird things like that. Once when I was about nine, Mum left me home alone for only about an hour, maybe even forty-five minutes – I wasn’t feeling well and Mum had to run out for groceries – I dropped out cat out of the attic window to see if it would land on all fours. It tried, but the fall broke just about every bone in its little body and it died right in front of me just as my family returned home. I remember frantically running around the back garden trying to hide it, but it was no use; Mum saw me stuff the cat in a bush and sent me straight to my room. Emma cried for hours; she had only just turned two years old, but she had loved that cat more than anything. So of course when we got a new cat, she got to name it. Being two, she called it Kitty.

I had the dream about Harry Potter and the prophecy again that night (and the next and the next). The chain of events was basically the same as it was the first night at the manor, except without the heart-stopping realization that it was about Death Eatery, because stuff like that is only heart-stopping once. Eventually I looked the incident up in the school library and got the names of everyone involved, just for curiosity’s sake, but otherwise I quit fretting about what it meant that I kept dreaming about it because I really couldn’t help what happened while I was asleep; I just let it happen, laughed it off when I inevitably woke up, and went right back to sleep. The only thing about I let myself worry over was whether anyone else was awake to hear me laughing, but I told myself that if they were and it bothered them, they’d come and tell me as much. And since no one did, I assumed I was fine.

As usual, the boys ignored me for the most part. So, when I wasn’t causing explosions or being otherwise destructive (having found a suitable blade in the kitchen, I assembled the miniature guillotine that I’d been contemplating in my few minutes alone on the path back to school before I had been kidnapped; it sliced a tomato very cleanly in half) or reading (another macabre mystery novel, this one about a small group of people all trapped in a house being picked off one by one by an unknown killer), I was forced to get my companionship by letting Mrs. Malfoy attempt to teach me how to act more high-class. The experience did not exactly start off fantastically.

Our first session was after dinner my second evening at the manor, in the library. Mrs. Malfoy began by saying. “I just thought I’d tell you, I actually had no idea until I met Steven that people ever adopted children in the magical community. Every so often an adopted muggle-born comes through Hogwarts, I think, but I’d never heard of an adopted half-blood.” Neither had I, actually, besides me and Stevie. “I asked Draco not too long after Steven's little visit at Christmas to try and find out what he could about whatever system processes adoptions in the wizarding world, and it turns out there isn’t one. There’s no need. What small number of orphans exist are nearly always raised by relatives or close family friends. And it’s quite unheard of for parents to simply give their baby up, to leave them at the entrance to St. Mungo’s, knock, and walk away. Which is what happened with you and Steven.”

“What? How do you know that?” I felt like if that were the case, then my parents would know, and they would have told me because that's the way they operate.

“Because there have only been seven foundlings at St. Mungo’s in the past twenty years, as Draco discovered, and each case was very carefully documented. Especially the one where two children - a boy and girl, neither of them more than a few days old and deemed unlikely to be siblings, were left on the same night,” Mrs. Malfoy replied. “What’s more, Draco told me it’s typically a simple matter for the staff at the hospital to locate the necessary records and identify one or both of the child’s parents so a relative might be recruited to take them in. Except for you and Steven. For some mysterious reason the St. Mungo’s people couldn’t find any records for either of you; all of the babies born to magical families in the week preceding your being dropped off were happily at home with their parents. No one could even begin to figure out where you came from. It was as if you had appeared out of thin air. Do with that information what you will.”

Well. That was definitely odd. And of course it appeared to lend even more credibility to her ideas. The number of coincidences was absolutely staggering, but I pushed that thought out of my mind and moved on: “So my birth parents dumped me off at St. Mungo’s and then just sort of…disappeared?” The words came out squeakier than I’d intended. Somehow, I’d always suspected that I’d been abandoned as a baby rather than orphaned. And so had James; as soon as he learned I was adopted, on the second day of classes first year, he told the whole school that my own parents had thrown me out because I was a freak. At first the rumor didn’t go far, but it spread like wildfire as soon as he had firmly established himself as popular. And also after I accidentally set him on fire during Charms one day and earned his undying hatred. From then on, it was all downhill. “They didn’t want me. It doesn’t matter who they were, because they didn’t want me,” I said numbly, feeling the weight of the realization like a weight on my chest.

“Oops,” I heard Mrs. Malfoy mumble to herself before (rather clumsily) attempting to reassure me, insisting, “Annalise, that isn’t true. You weren’t abandoned. It wouldn’t be possible for you to have parents who simply left you on the hospital doorstep without a trace.”

“Of course you don’t think so, because that would blow a huge hole in your concept of where I actually came from,” I snapped.

“No, because it really wouldn’t be possible. A magical quill at the Ministry apparently registers the details of every single birth in the wizarding community. And you wouldn’t have been left at St. Mungo’s if you didn’t have at least one magical parent, so you should have been on the list,” Mrs. Malfoy said evenly. I had heard about the quill from Charlie’s father once, so I knew it was real. It really irritated me that she was right. “I really don’t understand, Annalise: why is it that you’re so dead set on proving me wrong?”

“Why are you so desperate for me to believe you? I mean, really. What is the actual point of you trying so hard to convince me that once upon a time I was your certifiably insane sister? It’s not like it would be any benefit to you or anyone else.” Still stinging from the reminder that my birth parents had almost certainly abandoned me, it took some effort not to get teary.“It definitely wouldn’t make my life any easier.”

That question gave Mrs. Malfoy a moment of pause. “Um…well, I actually never thought much about that,” she admitted. “I never really considered what to do with you beyond finding you and telling you who you really are. But now that I’ve actually met you and seen how you’ve turned out, I have a slightly better idea what I want for you.”

“And what would that be?” I demanded.

With a sympathetic smile, Mrs. Malfoy explained, “To let you see that you’re worth something. To give you a family and a place to belong that you can be proud of. As I believe I’ve told you several times already, you deserve better than your current position. Much better.” That did actually sound nice, but I wasn’t going to pull a Stevie and fake that I believed her just to reap the benefits. “You know, I really looked up to Bella when I was a girl. Andie, too, but mostly Bella since she was the oldest. She wasn’t all bad, back then. It actually wasn’t till Andie ran off with that Ted character that she started acting noticeably unstable. The two of them were very close, or at least Bella thought they were. It absolutely shattered her to suddenly find out that they weren’t, that for two years Andie had been dating a mudblood and basically flouting every value our family had always held dear. So to overcompensate, she joined the Death Eaters and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I was very surprised to hear that. “Really? So she wasn’t always a heartless maniac?”

Mrs. Malfoy nodded. “No, she wasn’t. She did have the worst temper of anyone I knew and she definitely wasn’t afraid to get even with people when they deserved it, but she really did care a lot for me and for Andie, so she wasn’t heartless. She was almost three years older than me but only two years ahead of me in school – one ahead of Andie – and she took it on herself to make absolutely sure that nobody messed with her little sisters. If anyone did, she ensured that they’d never want to repeat the act. Even if whoever it was happened to be a big burly Beater on the Quidditch team. I thought she was terribly brave for getting back at boys like that when they tried to flirt with her and Andie. And she was really quite smart and had a terrific sense of humor and…I really am rather getting ahead of myself. Just understand that I adored her.”

I could see how she would. People tend to idolize people who terrorize other people on their behalf. That’s why Scorpius admires Stevie. “Okay, so you got on pretty well with your crazy sister before she officially lost it. You looked up to her because she was so confident and she looked out for you. I suppose it really bothers you, then, that you think I’m her and yet I don’t have that kind of assurance. Just the temper. You wish I was more like your memory of her when she was my age. Right?”

From the very slightly sheepish look on Mrs. Malfoy’s face, I could tell that I’d hit the mark spot-on. “I…well, that is one way to put it – you do have a knack for phrasing things to the worst possible effect – but I prefer to look at it this way: my parents taught me and my sisters that we were part of an illustrious family line, the best of the best. Bella never let anyone, least of all me and Andie, forget that. I don’t want to ever let you forget it either; I want you to be able to return to school with your head held high, knowing that you’re far better than anyone suspects. You aren't unwanted, nor are you the nobody you've become conditioned to believe you are. You are extraordinary. Remember that the next time that Potter boy tries to tell you otherwise. As you so plainly stated at dinner yesterday shortly before you left, he doesn’t know anything about you. He can’t tell you who you are,” she declared.

“But you can?” I asked drily. Even though I knew what she meant, I couldn’t help but be difficult and call her out on the way she worded things.

“Well, I certainly have a better idea about you than he probably does, and I only really met you yesterday,” Mrs. Malfoy said to clarify. “You’re clever, talented, determined – and yes, beautiful, even if you doubt it. And well-bred, though you never knew it and so can't project it. But we’ll work on that. So…yes. Where to start?” she mused, tapping her finger on the arm of her chair as she thought, until suddenly something occurred to her. “Of course!”

“What?” Frankly, I was a little afraid to hear what she had in mind. I knew I was a far cry from where Mrs. Malfoy would have liked me to be, but I seriously doubted that changing to fit her concept of me would gain me any new friends or be of use to me in any other way. 

Speaking in a tone that implied that the starting point should have been as obvious to me as it had been to her, Mrs. Malfoy said, “Since I haven’t yet figured out what you were taught by your adoptive parents that might need undoing, that should definitely come first." Of course. She couldn't do much of anything with her little lessons till she had a comprehensive idea of everything that needed fixing about me. You understand why it is so crucial for people like us – and all magical folk, really – to keep ourselves absolutely separate from muggles, don’t you?” she asked, sounding quite worried about what ideas I might have picked up in my childhood.

I nodded. “Yes, of course I do. My parents don’t – they think it’s all the same if muggles and wizards mingle but I think it’s just common sense that they shouldn’t. My dad's parents are both muggles and they kicked him out of the house as soon as he was of age because they hate magic. And my mum's parents - her mother was a witch and her dad was a muggle, and over time he found he couldn't stand magic either and he left when my mum was seven." I'm utterly amazed that neither of my parents are at all bitter about their families and that they still support muggle rights, but I suppose they're just so hardcore Hufflepuff that they're simply incapable of negativity of any kind. I'm negative enough for everyone, it seems. "The way I see it, muggles neither want nor need to cooperate with us, and we don't need them either

Only when she first laid eyes on me had I seem Mrs. Malfoy so happy. She absolutely lit up upon hearing that I didn’t agree with my parents’ views. “Exactly!” she exclaimed elatedly. “That’s exactly right!”

“Don’t be too thrilled. I haven’t got many more cut-and-dry opinions.” Intermarriage was probably one of the only issues I was absolutely set on. “I mean, the way I grew up, it didn’t matter if my friends were pureblood or half-blood – because remember, I thought I was half-blood too – so long as they were magical somehow. I know you’ve never met Charlie and you think her family’s a bunch of scum and traitors, but she’s great.”

“I suppose it’s understandable that you’d have little problem with half-bloods,” said Mrs. Malfoy with a sigh, her mood quite dampened by the reminder who my best friend was. “But you draw the line there, I assume? You don’t associate with mudbloods? After all you appear to have no qualms about using that term even though it isn’t precisely politically correct nowadays.”

“Considering that I only have one friend and she’s a half-blood, I guess I don’t associate with them. But I don’t hate muggle-borns, per se. Mostly I ignore them,” I said with a shrug. “And I really don’t know how or at what point I started freely saying the word mudblood – Charlie thinks it’s rude and never says it, and my dad definitely disapproves. I'm fairly sure I learned it from Stevie, even though his mum is one as well, but considering that we were both sent to our rooms whenever we said rude words of any kind as kids I have no idea why we both still use it so often."

“Interesting,” Mrs. Malfoy said. I could sort of guess what she must be thinking. Even I was a little curious about how my social attitudes, though cultivated in my parents’ philosophy of acceptance, tended slightly towards the typical pureblood ideology even though no one had taught that view to me.“And what exactly, do you think about…people like your friend Charlotte’s father?"

That was something I’d never really considered, so I sort of composed my opinion bit by bit as I talked. “I…well, Charlie loves her dad, and for her sake I couldn’t openly hate…um, his kind. And he really is a decent person over all, I suppose, like he seems really normal when you meet him. But I...I don't know, even he admits he's more or less the only nice werewolf he knows. All the others are quite brutal, or so I've heard, and read for my History of Magic class."

My view on that subject seemed to suit Mrs. Malfoy reasonably well, because she nodded and said, “That’s good. I can work with that. On the whole you aren’t hopelessly off the mark at anything – you just have slightly lower standards because you were brought up as a half-blood, but you seem to take the right approach to most things. Except your choice of friends, obviously, but we’ll let that slide for now because you met Charlotte when you were so young and you didn’t know about her father until much later, after you were quite close to her. You thought she was a normal half-blood.” No one with pink hair is normal. Even as a kid, I knew that. But I also knew I wasn’t quite normal either since I was adopted, so Charlie and I were a good fit or each other. Two slightly abnormal peas in a pod.

After Mrs. Malfoy finished evaluating my worldview, so she told me I could go. We’d pick things back up in the morning after she had a chance to think about what things about me most needed attention and how it might be possible to go about shaping me up over the course of just a few days. I realized as I returned to my room to begin getting ready for bed I was beginning to like Mrs. Malfoy, in a way. She was terribly old-fashioned and put far too much importance on events and people from the past, but she was actually very good at making me feel inspired. She believed in me, thought I was extraordinary (and beautiful – I still wasn’t over how great it was to hear that). I didn’t care if she halfway had Bellatrix in mind when she said that – it was what I needed to hear. And besides, the way she talked about her feisty oldest sister actually made pre-crazy Bella actually sound almost cool. I definitely wanted to hear more about her.

The “pureblood lessons,” which ended up happening twice daily, once in the morning and again in the evening (and always accompanied by tea and snacks), quickly devolved during our second session into little more than Mrs. Malfoy telling me snatches of her life story interspersed with whatever random pieces of advice she was ostensibly trying to illustrate. She only got about halfway through her school years by the time she was obligated to send me and Stevie and Scorpius back to Hogwarts to wait out the rest of the holiday, but she continued the narrative in regular letters to me. My favorite episodes from her early life, not surprisingly, involved Bella making trouble and her sisters desperately and sometimes humorously attempting to help her hide whatever disasters she created from their extremely strict and somewhat detached parents.

“Really, all she wanted was to get their attention,” Mrs. Malfoy explained. “They gave us everything we wanted except that. Mother was so preoccupied with her social life, and Father never wanted girls in the first place because we couldn’t carry on the family name, so they hired a nanny to do the hands-on childcare. Bella was always out to get rid of the woman and scared off an average of four a year. All three of us savored the time between one leaving and Father finding a replacement, because then Mother had to spend more time with us. I promised myself I’d never leave my children wanting for attention like that…but I may have overdone it a bit. Draco says I was overprotective and embarrassing.” I bet she was.

Mrs. Malfoy went on to explain particularly memorable incidents with the nannies in which Bella had “haunted” one’s room, convinced another that Andromeda was allergic to her, and hid all of the underwear and bras of yet another in various spots throughout their house and blamed it on the house-elf. “We learned to judge the quality of nannies by how hard it was for Bella to get them to quit and also how long it took for them to realize she was the one behind all of the mischief. A few of the dimmer ones never caught on that there wasn’t really a ghost, that it was just a little girl making screeching noises into the vent in her bathroom,” she said, smiling at the recollection.

It was quite an amusing mental picture: seven or eight year old Bellatrix marching into a playroom or something and proudly announcing to her little sisters, “[insert name here] is finally gone!” and Andromeda sighing and asking, “What did you do this time?” while Narcissa eagerly awaited the tale.

“Somehow in the midst of all that trouble we still got an education, learned reading and writing and all of the other basics we needed to be successful at Hogwarts,” Mrs. Malfoy continued. “Including etiquette, of course. Our parents didn’t want us to disgrace the family by not knowing how to act properly. Bella absorbed it all – believe it or not she could act like a perfect lady when she wanted to – but she never stopped tormenting the nannies until she started at Hogwarts.”

“So is there a point to that story?”

“I don’t know; I just like telling it. I suppose if there was a moral, it would be that you should at least know how to act in a refined manner even if you often choose not to. As naughty as she could be, Bella’s misbehavior had a point to it. Andie and I once told our parents how we felt about them ignoring us and they simply shrugged it off, but Bella got a response out of them. It was a negative one, but she still counted it. As a boy I once dated put it, diplomacy only gets you so far. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to get the results you’re looking for from people.”

That was an interesting twist on the idea that actions speak louder than words. Which I totally agreed with. I mean, really. Waltzing up to James and begging him to be nice to me would never send the message quite as well as a kick in his special place. “He sounds like a real winner.”

With a rather sappy, love-struck smile, Mrs. Malfoy said, “Yes, yes he was.”

“You ended up marrying him, didn’t you?”

“I did,” she said, her starry-eyed grin growing wider. “Lucius was the best thing ever to happen in my life, bar none. It only took one date for me to know he was the one, and he always said it was the exact same way for him. I fell in love with him not only because he was basically the total package – from a good family, well-connected, fantastically good-looking, really romantic…” I have to admit, I tuned her out right about there, jumping back into focus as soon as I heard Bella come back up. “…she was happy for me until Mother forced her to marry a man she didn’t love. Then she got horribly jealous and refused to speak to me for three months, or until she realized that she was extremely lonely and had no one else to talk to since Andie married Ted."


	10. In Which We Uncover the Truth

Just as she tied her advice for me into stories about her life with her sisters, Mrs. Malfoy managed to tie every story to Lucius somehow, even if the story didn’t directly involve him in any way. I usually couldn’t listen and pay atttention for long before getting sick of all the romantic blather. It all basically boiled down to this: the Malfoys had been almost weirdly attached to each other, and Mrs. Malfoy considered herself extremely lucky to have married for love (unlike Bellatrix) and still have loads of money (unlike Andromeda), and she missed her husband more than anything. “I only got through the last fifteen years without him because I talked to his portrait every morning – I still do, actually – but it isn’t nearly the same,” she lamented. “Paintings can only express so much personality, you know. Ours are better than most, but still.”

“You really need to get out more,” I told her. The remark was met by nothing but an unimpressed glare. “Don’t you have actual, live grownup friends to talk to instead of portraits and kidnapped kids?”

“No,” she said indifferently, and left it at that.

I’d have told her to try and make some instead of spending the rest of her life moping about whatever had happened to Lucius, but that was a rather hollow suggestion coming from someone who hadn’t made a new friend in years. “Would it really make things better if Stevie actually…you know, believed you? I mean, it’s not like you can expect to be romantically involved with a fifteen year old. And he doesn’t need a perfectly clear idea of his role in the family so long as he can be part of it somehow, does he?” I suspected she wanted more from Stevie than just him upholding the family name, and I hoped she’d let something slip on that front. Even though trying to draw that out of her involved more or less pretending to agree with her crackpot view of Steven. “He said yesterday that’s all he really wants, is to belong here. And I’m sure he’d do anything to keep the Malfoy name from disgrace whatever position he ends up in; despite everything, he’s very attached to it.”

“He said that?” Mrs. Malfoy asked, hope returning to her pale blue eyes.

I shrugged. “That was before he stopped speaking to everybody, but yes. He did. And he also said that tagging along with Scorpius for his little visit back in December felt like coming home.”

Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Malfoy was elated. “He did?” she squeaked. I nodded. “That’s wonderful! You do know what that means, don’t you? It means he knows; somehow, deep inside, Steven knows who he really is! He…Annalise, what are you doing that for?” she asked, noticing that I was frantically motioning for her to be quiet. I pointed at the doorway, in which Stevie was standing and glaring furiously at me. “Oh. I see. Um, hello, Steven. H-how long have you been standing there, exactly?”

“Long enough,” he said sourly, then turned to berate me: “Annalise, I told you those things in confidence! Have you no idea what that means?”

He’d never explicitly told me to keep that information secret, just not to laugh at him for his inexplicable love of the family that didn’t seem to want anything to do with him. But before I could tell him any of that, Mrs. Malfoy asked him, in a shy, tremulous whisper, “But you did tell them to her, is that right?”

“Yes,” he said resentfully. “But I didn’t mean…that is, I…Anna, this is all your fault! We had a deal, you rotten little snitch! You can’t just go around playing double agent and talking about me behind my back!”

“I was just supposed to make you look good in front of Draco, by comparison – that was the agreement. You didn’t say anything about not talking to his mother!” I declared, standing up so I could look Stevie straight in the eye and crossing my arms stubbornly.

Stevie’s face went bright pink, because I was right and he couldn’t deny that, but he tried very hard to. “Well, I’m saying it now; don’t talk to her.”

I just laughed in his face when he said that. “Contrary to what you seem to think, you aren’t in charge of me, pretty-boy. I can do what I want.” I taunted. “Just try and stop me – I dare you.” And then, while Stevie just stood there glowering as if he wished he could in good conscience punch me in the face in front of Mrs. Malfoy, I took my dramatic exit.

Stevie was after me in just a fraction of a second, shouting, “Get back here, Anna! Or at least explain yourself! I thought you hated Narcissa!” he yelled

“And I thought you liked her!” I retorted. “You changed your mind; can’t I?”

Upon hearing that, Stevie stopped in his tracks; without him chasing me, I stopped as well and turned to face him once more. “I never liked…or, well, it’s complicated, okay? I showed up in December expecting a joyful reunion with my real family, and I got frozen out by all of them…except for her. And Scorpius, but that goes without saying. She was nice to me. I didn’t know the reason why was that she’s completely mental,” he said bitterly. “I thought you agreed with me that she’s mad as a sack of pixies. So I’m curious: why are you spending so much time on her all of a sudden? You don’t…you haven’t…decided she might be…um, right? Right?”

“Don’t worry, I still think she’s totally bonkers,” I reassured him. “I just...well, hanging out with her is a lot better than sitting around in my room. Also, talking to her is letting me find out what she expects of us, which even you can’t deny is useful. And her stories are very entertaining.”

“I see,” Stevie said, nodding in a way that made it quite clear that he didn’t. “So that’s your reason for telling her those things about me? To find out what she expects?”

Since that was more or less right, I nodded. “She adored her husband. And frankly, things have gone downhill a bit for the family since he…um, died. I mean, you know the old families just don’t have the power they used to, because what really matters now is what side people took in the war, not ancestry or anything the Malfoys always depended on for their reputation. They’ve still got lots of money, and that gives them a certain measure of security, but lots of people still remember that they were on the Death Eaters’ side and don’t trust them anymore, and Draco’s just so indifferent about everything, he just lets it happen. Mrs. Malfoy thinks that you might be able to turn things around.”

Stevie really seemed to like hearing that his charisma was allegedly needed to keep his family’s reputation afloat, even if certain prominent members ticked him off. He straightened up a bit and, though he didn’t really smile, he looked slightly happier, and definitely less cross with me. “All right then,” he said proudly, but then a new thought struck him and he asked, “What about Scorpius? Shouldn’t that responsibility naturally fall to him?”

“You and I both know he hasn’t got quite the dynamic personality you do. And he defers so much to his older brother – or whatever you are.”

“True,” said Stevie, looking thoughtful, then finally granted a small smile. “I suppose I should have let you explain your double agency before calling you a rotten little snitch. So…yes. You can go back to tea with Narcissa now.” He then walked out, basking in the idea of redeeming himself to Draco by restoring his family’s name to its former glory…or I think that’s what he was mumbling to himself about. All I really caught was, “that should finally make him like me.”

The heavy rain let up the next morning, almost as a sign of Stevie’s and Mrs. Malfoy’s renewed hopes that things might just start looking up for everyone after two days of tensions and silent treatments. Both boys were thrilled because it was dry enough by the afternoon that they could play Quidditch outside again, and Draco was equally glad to get the boys out of the house for long periods of time. Unfortunately for him, I didn’t go outside with the boys often, and I rather made it a point to give him a hard time whenever possible. He’s even more fun to annoy than Stevie because he takes everything personally. On an unrelated note, Buddy snatched my mini guillotine and started using it as a kitchen tool. I’m not quite sure how I feel about that.

On the fourth morning at the manor, I arrived in the library before Mrs. Malfoy, who I later learned was held up by her son whining about how stressful it was to have three teenagers running around and asking when we were all going back to school. She said she told him to just deal with it and she’d get us back soon enough; she wasn’t quite done with us. By that, I think she meant she was either waiting for Stevie and/or me to come round and believe her explanation of who we were, or she hadn’t gotten as far in her lessons with me as she wanted to before sending me to try and put her advice into practice at school. But anyway, the important part is she was off bickering with her son but I didn’t know that, and I was in the library alone waiting for her to show up and tell me more weird stories about her life when I noticed a slim black book on a table.

The book hadn’t been out in the open like that when I’d last been in the room the previous evening. There was a small piece of parchment sticking out of it marking a place about a third of the way in, and it would not have been very notable at all, except for the title, embossed in silver along the spine: International Journal of Applied and Theoretical Magic, vol. 548.6, June 2018. I found that odd, because though the Malfoy family had a long history of dabbling in many things, experimental magic was never one of them. Because I knew I’d always wonder about why the book was there if I didn’t get a closer look at it, I picked it up and opened it to the spot where the parchment slip was. And there, laid out on the page in black-and-white, was a careful scientific article opening with these fateful words:

What was once considered to be an unfounded claim by husband-and-wife theoretical potioneers Delia and Gabriel Sterling thirteen years ago – that it is possible to modify a basic Shrinking Solution into a liquid that will permanently regress the drinker, regardless of age or species, to only a few days old – has finally been recreated at St. Mungo’s research branch. The potion has only been tested on mice, but it appears to work just as the Sterlings claimed it would, and as such it has been declared by the Department for the Control of Dangerous Substances to be illegal for reproduction in any significant amount due to its potential for misuse on humans.

Heart pounding, I stopped reading and fled the room (with the book in hand), screaming at the top of my lungs, “Stevieeeee!” Before I had gotten very far, I ran almost full-on into Mrs. Malfoy.

“Annalise, what’s happened? What’s that you’re holding?” she asked, looking concerned.

“Oh, this? It’s just…it’s a notebook I found and have been using to write down all the valuable life lessons you’ve been giving me,” I said, trying not to wince at how horribly unconvincing that lie was. “Speaking of which, can we postpone our little…thing? I have to, um…I actually have really bad cramps right now, so…I’m going to go lie down for a while.” I’ve found that mentioning what my dad calls “lady trouble” is usually a foolproof way to excuse acting oddly or not wanting to continue a conversation.

Mrs. Malfoy nodded sympathetically. “All right, you do that,” she said as I sprinted away from her and resumed yelling for Stevie. Which only resulted in Mrs. Malfoy calling after me, “Why are you shouting about Steven? Did he do something?” I didn’t bother to answer her; I just kept running and screaming.

I found Stevie playing a game of cards with Scorpius in his bedroom. “Stevie, I need to talk to you. Right now,” I said, a little out of breath from shouting. “It’s important.”

“How important is it?” he asked in a bored drawl, examining his cards.

“Extremely. Life-alteringly.” To my chagrin, Stevie’s casual demeanor didn’t change one iota. He decisively put down a King and smirked at Scorpius, who looked at his hand and frowned.

“Come on, you’ve as good as won anyway. Better at least see what she wants,” said Scorpius, throwing down his cards in frustration. I noticed they were all low numbers. Had he ever directly questioned his “brother’s” warped sense of fair play, I wondered, or did he just complain about it behind Stevie’s back like he had to me a few nights before?

With a “this had better be good” sigh, Stevie turned to me. “All right, Anna, what is it this time?” I held out the book so he could see the title.

Looking quite confused, he snatched it and was about to open it, but I grabbed it right back. “Not here; not in front of him,” I hissed, gesturing at Scorpius, who looked only a little put out at the exclusion. “Is there anywhere we can talk about it without a chance of anyone interrupting or listening in?”

Stevie nodded, no longer indifferent but instead possessed with a grim determination to see the book’s contents and figure out what it all meant, “I think I know a spot.” He started leading me back downstairs, being careful not to make too much noise. I followed his lead, taking off my heels so my footsteps would be completely silent. “Hopefully the coast is clear.” Thankfully, Draco and Mrs. Malfoy had resumed arguing about us in the dining room, so we had clear passage into Draco’s study, where Stevie fiddled a bit with the drawer pulls on the desk, then stood back. Slowly, the bookcase swung open to reveal a hidden door. Stevie looked in awe, as if he himself was surprised to see it. “Ladies first,” he said, waving me in.

I stepped into the pitch-dark corridor, where we had to conjure light just to see a few inches in front of our face once Stevie shut the secret door, and stone steps trailed down to what I guessed was an underground tunnel, high enough that only a very tall man might have to bend over but not quite wide enough for two to walk side by side. It smelled vaguely of earth but didn’t quite have the musty stench one would expect of a tunnel. Candleholders were spaced along the walls, some empty, some holding broken wax stubs “Where does this lead?”

“Um…I’m not exactly sure,” said Stevie. “I guess we’ll find out.”

“This is…wow. A secret passageway to who knows where,” I murmured, looking around, momentarily forgetting my shock and dread over the book to revel in the raw, enlivening feeling of adventure. “When did Scorpius show you this?”

“He…um, he actually didn’t,” Stevie admitted. Then, after a beat: “Would you believe me if I told you I saw it in a dream?” Considering the content of my dreams, I definitely would. Without waiting for my response, Stevie went on: “I’ve had it every night since coming here…it’s the weirdest thing. It’s just so detailed, much more so than any other dream I’ve ever had, or at least any dream that I remember having. But I always wake up before I see what’s at the end of the tunnel. No thanks to someone maniacally laughing down the hall.”

Well, it wasn’t like I could make it stop, since I was unconscious when it happened; I could only ignore his derision. “I’ve had dreams like that…or, well, just one, really, but it keeps popping up. I’ll tell you about it if you tell me yours,” I offered. Not that I actually wanted to tell him (or anyone) my dream, but I wanted to know the details of his and an exchange was probably the only way he’d tell me anything

Apprehensive and perhaps a little ashamed, emotions I was quite past by that point, Stevie shook his head. “I don’t…I mean, it’s nothing. Not worth repeating.” Such weak excuses. “Or, well, I suppose anything that reveals the location of a secret tunnel can’t exactly be called nothing. But it still isn’t worth repeating.”

Though the light from my wand wasn’t especially bright, when I turned to look back at Steven I could plainly see that he was terrified. Not that I could really blame him. We were in a secret tunnel he’d found because of something he’d seen in a dream. That wasn’t exactly normal, and considering the contents of the International Journal of Applied and Theoretical Magic on top of Draco and Mrs. Malfoy’s opinions, abnormal was a really bad sign for us. “All right then, don’t repeat it. I just…out of curiosity, did it have anything to do with Death Eaters?” He nodded. My fears were confirmed. The thrill of adventure dissolved just as fast as it had set in, and neither of us said anything more to each other until the tunnel suddenly dead-ended.

“Let’s just stop and talk here, then; it’s private enough” Stevie said, leaning against the wall resignedly. Why wasn’t I surprised when he accidentally pressed his hand against a rock that revealed yet another secret door, this one leading into a cavernous room, thankfully at least sort of well-lit by wall sconces? “…or, better yet, we can talk here.” The room was bare aside from several large steamer trunks and a wooden rack holding numerous bottles of wine. Stevie took a seat on the largest of the trunks and looked up at me, eyes bright with fearful curiosity. “Now, what is it that’s so important in that book?”

“Did you hear, the other day, what Draco said he’d found evidence that the magic behind his mother’s theory about us wasn’t as impossible as I thought?” Stevie nodded uneasily. “Well, I think this is the evidence he was referring to.” I then handed him the book and let him look the article over. Unlike me, he took the time to read the whole thing.

For a little while I just sat there watching him read, his brow furrowed in troubled concentration, his mouth set in a grimace. He could tell what the article almost certainly meant for him as well as I could, and no amount of searching through it for possible loopholes could change that. But I soon tired of waiting for him to finish and began poking around investigating the trunk I’d been sitting on. It was smooth black leather reinforced with shiny steel at the edges and corners. The silver latch, shaped like a snake’s head, refused to release with a simple unlocking charm; I suspected it might have been charmed to only open to a specific password, or even by a specific person. But the thing that held my attention was the luggage tag, black leather stamped with the Malfoy family crest, with a small flap that opened to reveal a small piece of cardstock on which was written: If found, please return to Malfoy Manor, Wiltshire, United Kingdom. DO NOT OPEN in angular cursive exactly identical to Stevie’s, only with a tiny bit more flourish. My stomach dropped; I had an awful feeling I knew just who all the trunks had belonged to.

Just then, Stevie broke the silence, “Where did you find this?” he asked in a harsh, nervous whisper. There was a bit of a tremor in his voice, I noticed. For some odd reason, maybe because I had not yet taken the time to let things sink in, I wasn’t nearly so agitated.

“The library. It was just sitting out.”

He nodded, shutting the book. “So I figured.” He looked up at me, desperation clouding his usually perpetual confidence. “It could still be all just a coincidence, right?”

I ripped the tag off of the trunk handle and tossed it to Stevie. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

Upon examining it, what little color was left in his face drained away completely. For a few seconds he did nothing but sit in numb realization, just absorbing the shock, then said with a miserable sigh, “I thought Draco was just bluffing about having evidence that so you would leave him alone. But he wasn’t. He was telling the truth – which means that his mother is right about us, which means that I’m…” He still couldn’t make himself say it.

“Yeah, yeah. But I’d say I’ve got it just slightly worse. I’m Bellatrix Lestrange.” I said. The truth of that statement as I spoke the words hit me like an unexpected punch to the gut. Suddenly, I felt quite dizzy. I didn’t realize that I’d even come close to passing out until I lost my balance and fell over, hitting my head on the wine rack. “Ow…could this day get any worse?” I groaned, and pulled myself up onto the trunk. “What I wouldn’t give for some short-term memory loss right about now.” Except I’d inevitably find the awful truth out again sooner or later, so there really wouldn’t be a point.

Again, Stevie sighed. “Yeah… after this, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look Scorpius in the eye again.”

“I know I’ll never be able to look Charlie in the eye again. Especially not next time she tries to reassure me that James is wrong and I’m not a psycho freak. Because thanks to that dratted book, I now know she’s wrong,” I lamented. I also knew she was technically my great-niece and that I’d attempted to kill her parents on multiple occasions, but that didn’t bear saying. “At least this gives you the rights to everything you’ve ever wanted – so long as you’ve got the guts to claim all of it, of course.”

“Of course I’ve got the guts!” Stevie seemed quite offended that I doubted him. But really, how could I not? He looked nauseous just thinking about Narcissa being right about him! “Don’t give me that look; I do! And you know it! Here, I’ll prove it. I’ll go and tell Draco right now that he was right.”

“All right then. You do that.”

Stevie gave a resolute nod and headed back through the entrance to the tunnel…only to come back not thirty seconds later, looking extremely distressed. “I can’t do this. Why can’t I do this?” he asked, pacing around the room anxiously, fingering the luggage tag.

I knew why; he couldn’t stand the idea of admitting he was wrong. Or perhaps he worried that Scorpius would find out. “Coward,” I coughed into my hand. “Loser.”

The insults did just what I’d intended; incensed Stevie enough that he declared, “I am not a coward!” and then marched off through the tunnel to prove it; meanwhile, I found another exit that led into the drawing room and snuck out that way, carefully replacing the book where I’d found it in the library. Unlike Stevie, I wasn’t about to tell anyone I’d found and read it. It was enough that I’d faced the truth in myself, and plus I really didn’t want to faint again in front of people. That would be just embarrassing, and embarrassment was just about the last thing I needed under the circumstances. What I did need was another matter entirely. Namely, time alone to figure out what to do with what I’d just learned.


	11. In Which I Feign Innocence

I returned to my room with a rather irrepressible urge to burn something. Since I couldn’t erase the truth, I really wanted to obliterate something else, just toss it in the fireplace and watch it disintegrate. After a quick look around, I settled on the hideous Aunt Susan sweater, which had had it coming for a long time indeed. It was a joy to see it finally go up in flames. But only that one object wasn’t quite enough catharsis for me, so I also got rid of the old, discolored socks I’d been wearing when I had first been brought to the manor. I’d have done the sneakers as well if burning rubber weren’t so noxious.

Only four days had passed since I’d worn them. It honestly felt like another life, which, as much as I’d hated, I wished I could have back more than anything. Don’t ask me why I burned practically all of the reminders of it I had with me at the time.

Still unsatisfied, I began a mad search through the room for more stuff to feed the flames and came across a list I’d made one evening of ways to get back at Stevie for being a jerk. Compared to what I had just found out I was theoretically capable of, it was all stupid kid stuff, the venting of an angry girl over petty problems, but I really had come up with some excellent ideas nonetheless. I stuffed the list in my pocket for future reference and kept digging in the nightstand, throwing blank sheets of parchment fluttering across the room to be incinerated shortly.

It was just as the specific reason why I was throwing things into the fire had been almost pushed out of my conscious thought that I came across a reminder, a smallish piece of paper folded roughly in quarters on which was written a list of names in exactly my handwriting. Several of them had been crossed out with a neat slash of black ink. Though there was no explicit label to identify it as a hit list composed by Bellatrix Lestrange, I knew that it must be. I had at least heard all of the names on it somewhere before (though for many I didn’t know quite where, a further indicator that I had retained some of Bella’s memories), but I could only match a few with faces. Those few happened to include Charlie’s parents. The longer I looked at the list, the more I felt like I was going to hurl. Once upon a time I’d been someone with a hit list.

By some unfortunate stroke of fate, Mrs. Malfoy knocked on the door only about two seconds after the ownership of the list had occurred to me. “Annalise, are you all right in there?”

“Yes…I’m fine,” I choked out, hoping I wouldn’t actually vomit.

“You don’t sound fine,” she said, as I willed her to go away, thinking over and over, please don’t come in. Please don’t come in. She came in anyway, to find me on my knees in front of the fireplace, head in hands, on the brink of hysteria. “Annalise! You look awful! You weren’t lying earlier when you said you felt ill. And here I thought…oh, you poor thing!” As she crossed the room, I quickly balled up the hit list and pitched it into the fire, which didn’t escape her notice. “Wait, what was that?”

“What was what?”

Mrs. Malfoy gestured at the fireplace. “What did you just throw in there?” Before I could tell her it was nothing, she asked in a somewhat wheedling tone, “Is there something going on that you aren’t telling me?” And when I didn’t answer immediately, she jumped to conclusions. “There is, isn’t there? What is it?”

“It’s none of your business,” I snapped, plopping down onto the bed. Mrs. Malfoy, predictably, looked unsatisfied with that explanation, so I reminded her, “Secrets and lies are a proud family tradition, remember?”

Not very pleased with having her own words turned against her, Mrs. Malfoy sighed. “You’re right; they are. I just wish you’d tell me what’s going on with you. And I know it’s more than just you not feeling well, so don’t bother using that as an excuse.” Taking a seat beside me, she said, “Please, Annalise. I thought we were past this point. I thought you’d come to trust me,” and put a hand on my shoulder.

I pushed it right off and scooted as far away from her as possible, so that I pretty much ended up curled into a ball by the headboard. “Just leave me alone, Narcissa.”

That was almost the right thing to say to persuade her to go away, only with one tiny flaw. “Oh, all…wait, did you just…you did! You used my first name!” she gasped in surprise. “For days now I’ve been asking you to call me Narcissa and you’ve been ignoring the request, and now…why did you change your mind?”

Actually, I had no idea. I hadn’t even realized I’d called her Narcissa until she pointed it out. Stupid subconscious. “Um, well, I…” I’m usually a pretty good liar, but thinking up a plausible fib to answer that question was a struggle. I briefly considered telling her what had really happened, but I didn’t think I’d be able to tolerate any sort of overjoyed reaction from her considering that I dearly wished it had never happened, that I was still an oblivious, semi-ordinary schoolgirl. “I don’t know why just did, all right?” I shot off impatiently. “Maybe Stevie rubbed off on me; he usually calls you Narcissa, doesn’t he? Now please, just go! I don’t want to talk to you right now.”

“All right, I’ll go,” Narcissa said gently, standing up and heading for the door. “Does this by any chance have anything to do with what you were yelling for Steven about?” Oh, only everything. “Or where you disappeared to when you said you’d be up here?”

How had she known? “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I declared, looking her straight in the eyes. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

Narcissa didn’t buy it. “I came up thirty minutes ago to see if you were all right, and you were gone.”

“I was in the bathroom,” I said flatly.

Not even seeming to hear me, Narcissa continued: “Scorpius was in his room, so I asked him if he’d seen you come upstairs. He told me that he had, that you had burst in demanding to Steven in private, claiming you had something extremely important to tell him that absolutely couldn’t wait, and then you and Steven went off together someplace.” Drat. She was on to us. “If you won’t say what you two were up to, I’ll ask him. And I’m sure he’ll be much more forthcoming.” I was sure too. Really, it was inevitable that Narcissa would find out sooner or later what had transpired between me and Stevie in the secret room; I was simply dreading the moment when that would happen. “Do you know where he is right now?”

“Downstairs, I assume. No doubt trying to negotiate with Draco.”

“Negotiate? Really?” Narcissa asked in mild surprise. “I thought they’d given up on each other days ago.” They had. Stevie had been quite clear on that; I’d heard him going on to Scorpius about how impossible it was to reason with his father.

“He’s giving it one more shot,” I told her simply. “He found something he hopes will convince Draco to give him what he wants. Or actually, I found it and showed it to him. That’s what we were up to.” Someone (Stevie, when we were eight and he found out I’d broken my mum’s only fancy serving plate before Mum did) once told me that if you can’t lie flat-out about something you don’t want to give away, the next best thing is to oversimplify and hope no one asks questions about the holes (it would probably have worked had Mum not walked in on us discussing how best to phrase to her what had happened).

Maybe Narcissa was familiar with that tack, or maybe she was just really determined to get all of her answers, because unlucky for me she asked questions. “What is it that you found?”

Keeping in mind that she would undoubtedly ask Stevie to corroborate my story, I had to choose my words carefully. “A rather incriminating document. It told Stevie everything he needed to know to make his case to Draco.”

Narcissa didn’t seem to know how to process that information, or even begin to guess what it meant. “What? Where did you…what did it say? Tell me what it said, Annalise,” she begged. Her whole body was trembling; her eyes filled with desperate tears as if she were afraid we’d found out that she was somehow actually wrong about Stevie, that she actually might be losing her mind. “As specifically as you can remember, what did it say, Annalise?”

There was no help for it – I really wanted to lie, but she’d soon find out if I did, so it wouldn’t do anything for me but prolong the inevitable – so I resignedly paraphrased for her what I’d read. “About fifteen years ago, these people – Delia and Gabriel Sterling, I think they were married – claimed that they’d invented a potion that would turn a person of any age back to a child. No one believed them. But then two years ago, some people at St. Mungo’s managed to recreate the potion and it did exactly what the Sterlings said it would,” I told her, looking past Narcissa out the window, my voice barely louder than a whisper. I was trying not to cry, but I could feel tears beginning to sting at the edges of my eyes and a dull ache in my chest. “You were… you were right all along. I really am Bellatrix.” It took every ounce of nerve I possessed to choke those words out in front of her. “So I’ve finally said it. Are you happy now?” I asked bitterly.

“Well, all things considered, yes. I would say I am happy,” Narcissa said. “But I can see you aren’t, so I’ll do my celebrating elsewhere.” I thought that meant she was finally going to leave me alone, but that unfortunately was not the case. She started to leave, but stopped at the door just in time to see me start to cry in earnest and turned around. “Annalise, I…”

“Go away. I don’t want to hear any more from you. Not a word.” Narcissa paused, but she didn’t start back towards the door until I screamed at her. “Go!”

As she was closing the door behind her, I heard her finish the sentence. “Annalise, I’m sorry,” she said quietly. I looked up, not wanting to believe my ears, and saw that she had started tearing up as well. “I understand now, you could have – should have – been totally free of that past, of all of the awful things that happened…oh, I made a terrible mistake, forcing it back onto you. So...yes. I’m sorry.” Having said that, she shut the door, likely to go and see what Stevie was up to.

Finally, I was left alone to fully process how I felt about the revelation that I was Bellatrix. The question was rather complicated by the fact that, according to Narcissa’s stories, she had apparently not always been a fanatically evil Death Eater. Before that, she had been a stubborn schoolgirl, fiercely protective of her two little sisters, confident in her place in one of the most prominent pureblood families at the time, smart and capable. Maybe not the nicest girl in school because she thought she was better than everyone, but if people didn’t like her – and many people didn’t – at least they respected her. And I really wanted that. On the other hand, she had grown up to become completely insane. Crazy seemed to be an unavoidable, inherited trait. But I couldn’t change that, so I had to grudgingly accept it, just as I had accepted that I’d never be popular at school. So I was Bellatrix, so what? I’d no choice but to get over it. Life would simply have to go on.

I got another knock on the door about ten minutes after Narcissa left to find out what progress her son and Steven were making in defining (or redefining, technically) the terms of their relationship. “Who is it?”

“Scorpius.” I opened the door and waved him inside, really hoping I didn’t look very much like I’d just been sobbing. He only took a few steps in. Was it just me, or did he look really nervous?

I tried to act causal. “Hey, what’s up? Something wrong?”

“Everyone’s acting weird again,” Scorpius told me, pouting. “Steven and Dad locked themselves in the study and I – I know it’s wrong, but I listened at the door, because I just don’t think it’s fair that I don’t get to know anything and…”

I’d have done the same thing if I was him. “What did you hear?”

Scorpius shook his head disappointedly. “Nothing. I forgot the door’s soundproof. So I figured, since you were the last person before Dad to talk to Steven, you might know what he was going to say. Do you?” I most definitely did. But did I want to tell him?

I settled on giving him the same basic, very simplified explanation that I had given his grandmother before I had been obligated to expand upon it, finishing with, “He’ll probably get permission to live here, probably in the room he’s staying in now, and be a proper part of your family – you want that for him, right?” His mother would probably have a conniption when she heard that the boy she believed was he husband’s secret love child was going to move in because it had been proven he was in fact a legitimate part of the Malfoy family, but that was no reason to deny Steven what was rightfully his.

“I guess.” He didn’t sound too enthusiastic. I wondered why. “I think Grandmum likes him better than she likes me.” That was, unfortunately, not exactly incorrect. “I know she thinks I don’t live up enough to the Malfoy name or whatever, but he apparently does and she only met him a few months ago. I like Steven – he’s still my best friend – but do you have any idea how annoying it is that he’s better than me at everything?”

I could only imagine. It’d drive me nuts to have an older sibling/ best friend like that, but luckily I had never been in that position. “If it’s anything to you, Stevie’s perfection is highly overrated,” I told Scorpius. “But don’t tell him I said that, okay?”

“Okay.” Scorpius smiled and nodded. He was so adorable, it wasn’t even funny. I wanted a sibling like him. “Hey, Anna, do you maybe want to play a round of Quidditch with me? I feel bad that I kind of gave you the impression a couple days ago that you could play and Steven didn’t let you, then I forgot all about it.”

“Sure, why not?” I had forgotten about it too, but since he mentioned it I realized I would be interested in getting out and spending time with someone who wasn’t a weepy old lady.

Upon coming down the stairs into the entrance hall, we encountered someone quite unexpected: Charlie’s mother. “Hello Anna, Scorpius. How are you?” she asked nicely, as if that could disguise the fact that she had undoubtedly come as an Auror on an assignment.

“Mrs. Lupin! I was wondering when one of you people would actually live up to your job description and investigate this kidnapping – and here you are! What impeccable timing – I’ve only been trapped here for four days!” I said sarcastically. “So, did Teddy propose already? How did that go?”

“She said yes, and Teddy couldn’t be happier” Mrs. Lupin said simply, then turned to Scorpius, apparently in too much hurry for chitchat. “May I speak to your parents?”

“Well, my mum isn’t home right now, but I’ll go get my dad,” he said, crossing the room to the study and pounding on the door. “Dad! Some Auror lady wants to talk to you! I think it’s about the kidnapping!”

I was quite impressed that it took less than a second for Scorpius’ father to step out of the study, looking quite ill at ease (Steven followed right behind him, utterly unperturbed). “Hello,” Draco said weakly. “I…um, I wasn’t actually responsible for bringing the children here. My mother’s the one behind it…but I do realize that I had ample opportunity to fix the situation and I didn’t, so I apologize.”

Mrs. Lupin nodded curtly. “And where is your mother?”

“Right here!” Narcissa called out, emerging from the drawing room. She too looked a bit anxious, and had decided to overcompensate for that by acting overly, almost hyperactively cheerful. “So you’re little Nymphadora. Though not so little now. How’s your mother? Would you like some tea?”

Mrs. Lupin held up a hand and shook her head, “No, tea won’t be necessary. I’m just here to investigate the situation and take the children back to school.”

“Yes, of course,” said Narcissa meekly.

And so the investigation began. We were called into the dining room one by one to give our accounts of what happened. Draco went first, followed by his mother, Scorpius, Steven, and finally me. Everyone not being interrogated at any given time took turns listening at the keyhole, even Narcissa. With barely a word passing between us, we decided what needed and didn’t need to be said by each person. Scorpius was to be mostly truthful; the rest of us were permitted to leave things out if we needed, and everyone’s stories had to work together. Frustratingly, Draco left very little out. But he did refrain from revealing that I had come to believe his mother’s theory, if Stevie had even mentioned to him that I did. Sometimes it’s quite convenient that he only ever thinks about himself.

I will never forget the look on Scorpius’ face when he overheard Mrs. Lupin asked Draco, “Why did your mother kidnap Annalise and Steven, do you know?” and Draco’s responded evenly, “She got herself convinced a few months ago that Steven and Annalise were my father and aunt Bellatrix, turned back into children, and she wanted to prove it to them and to me. Scorpius just got brought along because she figured he’d appreciate a holiday.” With a decisive “hmm,” Mrs. Lupin then said, “That’s…quite an odd idea. What do you think of it?” Draco’s answer made the rest of us all cringe. “I doubted at first, but now I wholeheartedly believe her.”

Scorpius’ eyes went wide for a moment, and from the way he had his mouth set it was easy to tell the idea positively disgusted him. He looked at his grandmother, and then at Stevie…and then started laughing. “That’s what everyone’s been talking about behind my back? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!”

“Shut up; they’ll hear you!” I hissed as Steven pulled him away from the door so he could take his turn eavesdropping.

Narcissa backed up everything her son said, but pretended she didn’t know that Steven had dropped the claim that he was Draco’s child. And of course, she said nothing of what I thought because she understood that wasn’t something my best friend’s mother should know. She tried to ask a few questions of her own, about whether any authorities were aware of what had occurred fifteen years ago and whether the people responsible would be prosecuted, but either Mrs. Lupin didn’t know or she was not permitted to say. Nevertheless, Narcissa declared that she was definitely going to sue Delia and Gabriel Sterling for taking her beloved Lucius away from her.

The interrogation of Scorpius was mercifully short; he knew little and said as much. Stevie answered the questions succinctly, wasting no words on excuses or obvious tricks, said almost nothing at all about me, and his story never deviated from Draco’s, except the very end. “I don’t really believe any of it. I was just pretending when I said I did, to see how Mr. Malfoy and his mother would react,” he lied. “Since Mr. Malfoy kept saying I wasn’t his son, I wanted another way into the family. I went back and forth for days on whether to go through with it, and you heard Mr. Malfoy say I came very close a couple times, but today I decided I had to try it or I’d always be wondering what if I did.” Mrs. Lupin went “hmm” again, slightly skeptically, but she asked no more questions. She just let him go and told him to send me in.

As I had expected, Mrs. Lupin had been making summaries on everyone’s stories in a small notebook. Not that it mattered. I’d had the benefit of hearing four other parallel accounts and had the time to think of exactly where I should fit into them. I would give nothing away. But first, back to small talk. I needed to think and talk about something normal. I needed to show her right off I was the same girl she had always known. “When’s Teddy’s wedding going to be? Will I be invited?”

“Next summer. I anticipate Charlie will want you invited, but in all honesty I don’t think you’d enjoy yourself at an event where most of the young people will be Weasley relatives who I know you aren’t on particularly good terms with. So we’ll see,” Mrs. Lupin said cautiously, which basically meant no, I wouldn’t be invited. I expected as much. But she was right: I probably wouldn’t enjoy myself anyhow if I were. “So, on to business: under what circumstances did you come here?”

I told her about meeting Narcissa on the road and being side-Apparated into the front hall of the manor and how I reacted and our conversation over tea. The word “crazy” was sprinkled liberally through my descriptions of Narcissa, and I made a point to ramble a lot about how much I had hated being kidnapped with Stevie up until the striking of our deal. “He said he couldn’t picture me having friends! Or feelings – can you believe it? How much more awful could he have been?” Whining was key. “For days I’ve been trapped here with nothing to do any no one to really talk to. I tried to escape three times, but I always got stopped. Thank goodness you’re here to get me out of this awful place.”

Mrs. Lupin scribbled down a few notes, then looked at me with a rather tired smile. “Yes, thank goodness. I feel just awful it took so long for the Auror office to send someone to sort out this mess. But I’m glad I got to be the one to do it.”

“Why? Do you like foiling kidnappings by crazy old women?”

“On the contrary. If anyone else had been kidnapped I’d consider it a hassle to have to investigate. But, it being you, one of my daughter’s best friends for so long, I suppose I liked being able to come see for myself that you’re all right. I don’t think you would have been nearly so cooperative if someone else had come and was interviewing you. You know me well, and you’re comfortable talking to me, I think perhaps more than your own mother on some subjects.” I hoped she wasn’t referring to my questions about sex when I was a kid. “That means I’ve become rather adept at figuring out when you’re lying. Now, do you want to tell me which parts of what you just told me weren’t precisely true, or shall I?”

I should have known she was good at lie detection, considering she more or less does it for a living. “Okay, fine, I’m not actually too eager to get back to school,” I admitted. “I don’t want to go back to being mocked by everyone. It was actually almost nice being here and having Stevie be the only person teasing me. Almost.”

“That’s better,” Mrs. Lupin said, nodding. She knew I was still holding out on her, I think, but she let it slide. “Thank you. You can go now. We’ll be on our way as soon as I finish up a few last little details.”

In preparation for leaving, all I had to do was tell Buddy to put all my clothes and every open bottle on the bathroom counter in whatever containers were appropriate and then leave him to the work while I went and eavesdropped on Mrs. Lupin talking to Narcissa and Draco about the situation they’d created. “You both know charges will have to be pressed for what you’ve done, right?” she asked sternly. Behind me, I could hear Stevie enthusiastically going on to Scorpius about how he planned to move into the manor after school let out for the summer

“But I didn’t do anything!” Draco protested. “And Scorpius is my son, plus Steven came willingly, so that’s not technically a kidnapping, is it? Annalise, well… if having her around for four days wasn’t punishment enough, my wife is probably going to kill me or worse when she finds out Steven was here and I let him stay four days. Charges are not necessary, believe me.”

“I’m sorry you had a hard time, but that’s just the way things have to work,” said Mrs. Lupin coolly. And then, finally, she got to the interesting stuff. “Just so you know, Mrs. Malfoy, you happen to be right about Steven and Annalise. I’ll even go so far as to say you were quite clever out have figured out the connection between them and the sudden disappearance of your husband and sister fifteen years ago. The question of what happened to them actually stumped Aurors for a very long while. They were assumed dead, as you know, since a small number of their personal effects was mailed to our office along with a note saying simply ‘you’re welcome,’ but those of us who looked into the incident had no idea how that had come about or who was responsible. There were no leads, no…anything, really. It wasn’t until a few years later when my daughter Charlotte introduced me to her new best friend Anna that some pieces started falling into place. I was good friends with Delia through school and I knew what she was working on, and I knew her lab had been broken into and some of her samples stolen, and…well, we still have no idea who was responsible, but at least we have a better idea what happened.”

Sounding disappointed that she couldn’t sue them, Narcissa asked, “So what you’re saying is, these Sterling people didn’t do it? And you’re sure of that?”

Mrs. Lupin’s voice was resolute. “Positive. Now, I have to go and get the kids back. Once these reports get looked at, which should only take a couple of days, you’ll hear about what sort of consequences you’ll be facing.” And with that, she (and Draco and Narcissa) came back into the entrance hall to find Scorpius, Stevie, and me waiting patiently. We were all pretending to be eager to go. Maybe Scorpius really was, but I could see Steven wasn’t happy in the least to be leaving the place he’d worked so hard to finally call home again. And I…well, suffice it to say that I had very mixed feelings about the whole business. “Come on kids, let’s go.”

“I’ll send your things on to Hogwarts for you as soon as possible,” Narcissa promised. I don’t think Stevie would have agreed to go anywhere without hearing that.

“Back to school, then?” he asked, full of false cheer.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Mrs. Lupin asked, her tone just slightly teasing. Stevie looked at her blankly; I’m sure I did as well. I couldn’t think of anything I could have possibly forgotten. “Your parents? They’ve been beside themselves since they learned you were kidnapped. It wouldn’t be fair to them for me to send you back to school without letting them see you first, to reassure them that you’re all right.”

“Oh. I…” Stevie struggled to string together a response that would not betray his reluctance to be reunited with his adoptive parents, knowing that they’d surely fuss over him and assume that being kidnapped had been an awful experience for him when in fact the opposite was much closer to the truth. “Yes, you’re right, it wouldn’t be fair. How could I have forgotten? We had better go see them. Right, Anna?” he asked, giving me an expectant look.

I nodded, perhaps a little too emphatically to be convincing. “Oh, absolutely. We couldn’t possibly just go back to school without proving to them that we’re safe, that even though we were kidnapped we weren’t tortured or brainwashed or any one of those ridiculous worst-case scenarios that Stevie’s mum is so fond of.” Mrs. Edwards always assumes the worst about a situation. Especially one involving her darling Stevie. While shopping in Diagon Alley for school supplies before our first year, Stevie paused for a second to admire the window display at Quality Quidditch and got separated from his mother in the crowd for about a minute, during which she became nearly convinced that he’d been abducted or trampled to death and had just begun hyperventilating when he turned up begging her to enter a drawing so he could win a broomstick. She was not going to react well to the news that Stevie wanted to leave her and (re)join the Malfoys.

“All right then, let’s get going – for your sake, Scorpius, I’ll try to make sure this doesn’t take all day,” Mrs. Lupin said, herding us into the fireplace and clearly pronouncing Stevie’s home address.


	12. In Which There is Much Awkward Hugging

The instant we materialized in the Edwards’ living room, Mrs. Edwards swooped in to embrace her son. Except she didn’t look closely enough at the boys and ended up pulling Scorpius into her crushingly tight embrace instead while Stevie stood off to the side and snickered. “Um, Mrs. Edwards…” I began, but Stevie shushed me.

“No, don’t. I want to see how long it takes her to figure it out on her own,” he hissed.

“Oh, Steven! It’s so good to have you back, sweetie! Thank goodness you’re all right! You must have been through a lot – I mean, you were kidnapped by the Malfoys! I can’t imagine how awful that would be!” sobbed Mrs. Edwards, clutching a very uncomfortable Scorpius ever tighter. Then, suddenly, she pulled back a bit so she could see his face and I thought for sure she’d notice that the boy in her arms wasn’t her son, but (maybe because her eyes were too full of tears for her to see properly) she didn’t and went right back to intense hugging.

“Catherine…” Mrs. Lupin said, tapping Mrs. Edwards on the shoulder. “Catherine, this is a bit awkward, but…that’s Scorpius Malfoy you’re hugging. Not Steven.” At once, Mrs. Edwards stepped back, mouth agape, looking as if she had been burned. She wiped the tears from her eyes and gave Scorpius a good long look, then glanced off to the side and spotted Steven. The room went dead quiet for about a minute as she looked from one boy to the other, just absorbing the similarity and what it all undoubtedly meant. And then she fainted. Luckily her husband had just walked into the room and was available to catch her.

“Steven! You’re home!” Mr. Edwards exclaimed after he had carefully set his still-unconscious wife on the sofa. “I guess your mother must have been so happy so see you that she just…wait. Who’s your, um, friend?” Unlike his wife, he managed to address the right boy, although from the way he looked at them I could tell he wasn’t a hundred percent certain which one was which and had more or less just had to guess.

“Oh, yes. Right. I suppose a couple introductions would be order here,” said Stevie offhandedly. “Scorpius, this is my dad. Dad, this is Scorpius Malfoy.”

“Hello,” said Scorpius brightly. “It’s great to finally meet you, Mr. Edwards. Steven’s told me a lot about you.” Knowing Stevie, most of what Scorpius had heard had been griping about how overprotective his parents could be, but there was no reason for Mr. Edwards to ever find that out.

Mr. Edwards looked to Mrs. Lupin for confirmation that Stevie was telling the truth about the identity of his “friend.” She nodded, and his eyes went wide. In a rather squeaky voice, he asked, “Malfoy? But he looks just like you – does that mean…?”

“Yes.” Stevie said with a definitive nod. “I’ve found out who my real family is. Isn’t that wonderful?”

It was quite easy to tell that “wonderful” was not the word Mr. Edwards would have chosen to describe the situation; he looked quite hurt to hear Stevie say that, with the implication that the Edwards were not his real family. But, to his credit, he didn’t let himself come across as too upset. He just quietly said, “I didn’t even know you were interested in looking for your birth parents, son.”

The look Stevie gave his father was positively withering. “First of all – and I do regret not being able to tell you about this sooner, but I only just got full confirmation that I am a Malfoy by birth this morning – I’ve been ‘interested’ for about three years, since I first met Scorpius. Actually, I really didn’t have to ‘go looking,’ as you put it. From the instant I first laid eyes on this kid getting on the train I knew we were related. And I knew he wasn’t adopted, since he looks just like his dad. So I could figure out what that meant about me easily enough. Second, don’t act so surprised that your adopted child got curious about where he came from,” he said coldly. “You didn’t seriously think that this – this boring, safe middle-class life in this boring, safe middle-class town with you and Mum – would keep me from wondering, did you? Because I’ve been wondering for a very long time, ever since I was a little kid. I knew, somehow, that I was meant for more. And now I can finally have it.”

“Have what?” Mr. Edwards looked confused. As if it weren’t perfectly clear what Stevie was telling him. Maybe he just didn’t want to believe it and asked for clarification in the hopes that his son didn’t mean what it seemed like he meant.

Impatiently, Stevie explained, “The sort of life I was meant for, of course. I plan to live with the Malfoys from now on.” Mr. Edwards’ jaw dropped in shock; noticing this, Stevie was quick to add, “Oh no, it’s nothing against you and Mum. Don’t get me wrong, you’re both really great people, and really good parents too. I’m very grateful for all you’ve done for me all these years. I just…I belong with my real family, is all.” Which was basically just a bunch of empty feel-good placating blather and everyone knew it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Mrs. Lupin shaking her head, like she was thinking about what an impossible lot of twits the Malfoys are. I couldn’t say I blamed her.

“We’re your real family too,” protested Mrs. Edwards, who had come to just in time to hear her son announce that he wanted to move out. “You belong with us! You can’t just leave!”

I think Stevie was about to say something like, “oh, yes I can” but before he could, his father asked a fair but rather provoking question: “Do you know if the Malfoys even want you to move in with them? I mean, have you actually asked them about it?”

“Of course I have – what sort of person do you take me for?” Stevie said testily. But the way he spoke was just slightly unsure, which is what made me realize that I actually had no idea whether or not he had reached a definitive agreement with Draco on that subject before Mrs. Lupin showed up and halted negotiations. He might have, he might not have. No one but he and Draco knew for sure. “They want me back more than anything, always regretted that I was given up for adoption. That’s why they kidnapped me. They found me, realized I was one of theirs, and without telling me or anyone else they decided to bring me home.” The word “they” in each case only honestly applied to Narcissa, but as the Edwards were apparently pinning the blame for the kidnapping on the whole Malfoy family, so Stevie joined in generalizing a bit. Plus, it wouldn’t have been at all convincing if he’d let on that the only person who really wanted him was an emotionally unstable sixty-five year old woman.

Stevie’s words made Mr. Edwards more than a bit flustered, to the point where he just decided to wrap up the whole argument before he could hear much more stuff he’d end up wishing he could forget. Rather angrily, he told Stevie, “This is your home! Here, with me and your mother! You can’t just toss aside us, the people who raised you, who have loved and cared for you since you were a baby, in favor of a new family, even if you’re right and they do want you – life doesn’t work that way! Your mum and I are still legally responsible for you till you’re of age. That means that you’re still our son and you still live here when you’re not at school. I’m sorry if you think that’s unfair, but it’s the way things have to be and that’s the end of it.”

Now, I don’t claim to possess much (or any) legal knowledge, but as far as I knew Mr. Edwards was probably right – in the eyes of the law Stevie belonged to the Edwards family and that was not liable to change anytime soon. Maybe when he came of age he could do something, but it was also possible that there was nothing he could ever do. But Stevie was a Malfoy boy through and through; he’d been fighting for days to make his grand dreams a reality, and he was not about to give up trying to find a way to have his way. “No, that’s not the end. It can’t be the end. I won’t let it be. Come on, there’s got to be something we can work out! I don’t suppose there’s any way you could, I don’t know, share me with the Malfoys? You can get me some holidays, they get me others, that sort of thing. What do you think, Dad? That could work, couldn’t it?” he pleaded.

His father was not particularly fond of the idea; he absolutely refused to discuss it. “I said that’s the end of it, Steven.”

“What, do you have something against the Malfoys? Because whatever they did, I’m sure I can talk Scorpius’ dad into apologizing for it. Seriously. The man regrets pretty much everything he’s ever done.” Including being sucker enough to let Stevie come over for dinner back in December, thereby starting the whole “who the heck is this kid?” business. “Please, Mum and Dad, they’re my family too, and we can’t just ignore that because it makes you uncomfortable.”

An uneasy silence settled on the room as the Edwards parents tried to process what they should do about their son, who clearly wasn’t about to quit wanting to sustain a relationship with the Malfoys no matter what they said or did to try and dissuade him. The silence was broken by my parents (and Emma) dashing in; apparently Mrs. Lupin had quietly slipped out and gone next door to tell them I was back while I was absorbed in Stevie’s little tiff with his parents. “Oh, Anna! We were so worried about you!” Mum exclaimed as she hugged me. “Are you all right? I can hardly…oh, it must have been such a traumatic experience for you!”

I suppose it sort of had been– finding out I’d had a murderous past life had been a rather nasty shock– but I didn’t want to be babied, nor did I want to discuss what had happened in any way with my parents, so I shrugged it off. “Look at me, Mum. Do I look traumatized?” I asked, stepping back so she could see me clearly and hoping that I looked fine despite the crying and adventuring though dark dusty tunnels I’d done earlier in the day.

“No, you don’t,” she admitted after giving me a quick once-over. Reassured that I was perfectly okay, Mum nodded. “All right, glad to hear no harm came to you, darling. I don’t suppose you’ve any idea at all why you were kidnapped, then? It wasn’t for money obviously, since we didn’t get a ransom note.” Plus, whatever my family could scrape together for ransom was probably pretty insignificant compared to what the Malfoys are all worth. “And you say they weren’t interested in…um, hurting you in any way, so what sort of reason did they have?”

“Well, it was really just because Scorpius’ grandmum – that’s Scorpius over there in the corner being ignored by everyone, by the way – has been very lonely ever since her husband…um, died, and I just happen to look sort of like…like an old friend of hers, and she’s sort of losing touch with reality so she thinks I actually am that person.” Oh, the joys of oversimplification. “She just brought me in to give her some company for a few days. That was it. I was just like a regular houseguest, except I didn’t come by choice. It was more weird than scary, honestly. Stevie, on the other hand – I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that he looks an awful lot like Scorpius – they picked up to try and figure out how he’s related to them.”

Apparently Mum and Dad hadn’t noticed the resemblance between Stevie (who was at the time still trying to reason with his parents) and Scorpius, or at least they hadn’t really processed the meaning of it, because after I pointed out they both just stared at him for a few seconds. “Oh my word…” Dad murmured. “Look at him, he’s the spitting image of Draco – how did we never notice that?”

“Easy. You didn’t want to notice, so you didn’t,” I said with a shrug.

“Yes, I suppose none of us wanted to see that the boy next door probably came from a family of Death Eaters.”

Stevie gave my dad a very sour look for saying that, but at least he had all eyes in the room on him to set everyone’s facts straight. “Not all of them were Death Eaters, Mr. Doyle. Scorpius’ grandmum wasn’t, and his dad was actually kind of forced into it, he didn’t actually want to be one. Second, that was more than twenty years ago. Things have changed a lot since then. They’re not so bad any more. They’ve all moved on, put the past behind them. You should too. If you need proof, just talk to Scorpius. You’ll see he’s a perfectly nice person,” he declared, walking over to Scorpius in the corner putting his arm around his shoulder. “I’m proud to call him my brother.”

Now, all eyes were on Scorpius, who seemed understandably a bit nervous about having to represent his whole family to a room full of people. Despite Stevie’s words, the parents still looked quite suspicious. Little Emma, however, had no context for disliking the Malfoys and therefore no reservations about doing as Stevie suggested and talking to the strange boy who looked so much like Stevie. “Hi, I’m Emma,” she chirped. “What’s your favorite color? Mine’s pink.” As if it weren’t obvious considering that she was dressed head to toe in pink.

“Um, I don’t know. Blue, maybe?” he answered.

“That’s a really nice color,” said Emma, nodding decisively as she took a few seconds more to settle on an opinion of Scorpius before declaring, “I think I like you.”

Encouraged by the affirmation given him by one little girl of average intelligence on the basis of his reply to one very simple question, Scorpius took a deep breath and step forward and addressed Stevie’s and my parents. “Look, I know my family did a lot of nasty things to a lot of people for a long time, and maybe they even hurt you or someone you know. And I really won’t blame you if you don’t believe me because no one ever believes my dad when he says things are different now, and I don’t really know how to prove it, but they are. Everything my dad was and his dad was, I don’t want to be like that. I’m not like that. I don’t like making a big deal out of myself and I don’t think I’d ever be willing to hurt someone to get my way like everyone seems to think is all my family ever does. To be honest, most of the time Steven acts more like people’s typical image of a Malfoy than I do.”

“It’s true,” I put in. Anything to get dear little Scorpius out of the parents’ needless scrutiny. “I just spent four days with the pair of them and I swear if I didn’t know either of them beforehand I’d think Scorpius was the one given up for adoption and raised by an ordinary middle-class family. By some miracle, he’s completely normal. No high-class airs or anything. It’s kind of baffling, if you ask me.” There was an explanation for why Stevie was the way he was, but Scorpius’ disposition was a total mystery. I’d say he probably got it from his mum’s side of the family, but from what I’d heard about Astoria (which, granted, was not a lot) she didn’t seem all that sweet either.

“Well, maybe Scorpius is unusually grounded for a spoiled rich kid, but if there’s one thing I know it’s that no one would ever mistake our little Stevie for a born-and-bred pureblood type, what with him always doing all he can to help the community, starting that mentoring program for first-years who are having trouble adjusting and raising money for African orphans and giving…” she stopped when she noticed that Scorpius and I (and Mrs. Lupin as well, sort of) were stifling snickers at how very misinformed she was. “What? What’s so funny?”

“Is that what he told you he does in his free time?” Mrs. Lupin asked.

Mrs. Edwards blinked. “Yes,” she said, a bit cautiously. “Why? Does he not…did he…lie? Is all that just a lie, Stevie?” she asked, her eyes pleading him to say no so she wouldn’t have to confront that her son wasn’t quite as perfect as she thought he was, that Stevie was a Malfoy and he really did act like it.

“Um…yeah. Yes it is,” admitted Stevie. “Pretty much everything I told you in my letters home that I do is completely fictional.”

“But why? What made you want to make up all those things you told us about? Was it just for fun, seeing how many larger-than-life stories you could get people to believe, or what?” Mr. Edwards asked.

“Well, long story short I did what I did all because I wanted you and Mum to see me as everything you’d ever wanted in a son, even though that wasn’t quite what I wanted to actually be,” Stevie said. “So I kind of created this double life for myself, and...well, it sort of took on a life of its own after a while. You think I’m a totally different person than most of my school friends, who think I’m a totally different person than I probably really am, because I did the same thing to them that I did to you. I gave them the version of me that I thought they would like best. But I suppose now it’s high time I settled on trying to become the person I want to be really, and I think I’ve got a pretty good idea who that is now.”

Anyone who didn’t know the details of what had happened with him over the past few days ( specifically, his parents) undoubtedly interpreted that as a very eloquent apology for his two-faced lying and a promise to quit giving into peer pressure so much and start just being himself. Which, I guess it sort of was. But where (judging by the pleased looks on their faces) his parents thought that meant he’d start acting like the nice, fair boy they’d raised him to be, I knew that he really just wanted to start embracing the Malfoy in him more than ever. Starting, more likely than not, with stubbornly insisting on a deal in which his adoptive parents had to share him with his blood relatives. He had a birthright to take back, and nothing was going to stop him from getting at it if he had any say in the matter. No one was going to get in the way of his dreams, not even his parents. Especially not his parents.

Thinking about Stevie’s probable plans got me wondering what I was supposed to do with myself going forward. Unlike him, I didn’t have a definitive niche in society that I could attempt to take that would let me reconcile my past with my present and figure out what to make of my future. I just had Narcissa’s stories, a few hazy and seemingly random memories of places and people who were mostly long gone, a stubborn reputation at school for being psychotic, and the vague certainty that I was going to one day go completely insane. That had somehow seemed perfectly acceptable back at the manor, but now that I was faced with the real world I realized that was actually terrible. None of that would ever get me anywhere.

Since Stevie’s somewhat ambiguous apology had placated the Edwards, The conversation veered back to questions about what exactly had happened to us over the past few days. Stevie and I (but mostly Stevie since he’s a more convincing speaker and I was kind of absorbed in worrying about how my life seemed doomed) took turns answering with as much detail as we deemed necessary, leaving out by unspoken agreement all of the specifics of Narcissa’s true reasons for bringing us both to the manor and putting particular stress on how well we had been treated. This went on till about midafternoon, at which point Mrs. Lupin announced, “I should be getting the children back to school soon.” And not a minute too soon, either; I felt like I was just one more variation on the tired theme of “poor little Anna” away from having a minor mental breakdown.

For some reason, the parents seemed surprised to hear that we had to leave. “What? Why? After all she’s been through, can’t Anna stay on with us for the rest of the holiday?” Mum asked.

Mrs. Lupin looked at me and I at her, and I hoped she could read on my face how one of the absolute last things I felt like I needed after all I’d been through was to continue being smothered by my well-meaning adoptive family. From a glance, I could tell that Steven was thinking pretty much exactly the same thing. It was a huge relief to both of us when Mrs. Lupin answered, “I’m sorry, Martha, but technically your daughter is supposed to be at school right now, so that’s where I’m obligated to return her. The same goes for Steven as well, Catherine. It’s disappointing, I know, but I didn’t make the rules.”

Though all of the parents looked let down, they at least pretended to understand and be okay with Mrs. Lupin’s reasons for not allowing Steven and me to stay home with them for the next week and a half, which I highly suspected were made up on the spot. “Oh, all right. I suppose there’s no help for it: you’ve got to go,” Mr. Edwards said resignedly. “Good luck, Stevie. And you too, Anna. See you in June!”

“And don’t you forget to write home every once in a while – and this time, be honest!” Mrs. Edwards added.

“All right Mum, I will,” Stevie (probably) lied.

Another round of crushing hugs was given by the parents, and a fair amount of tears were shed by Mum and Emma and Mrs. Edwards because our visit home had been so brief, so goodbyes took about three times longer than they could have. Then, finally, Mrs. Lupin activated an emergency Portkey to transport me and Stevie and Scorpius back to the Hogwarts gatehouse, not far from where I’d first encountered Narcissa on the path. “Come on, kids, back to the castle,” she said, leading the way down the path. As when I’d been walking back from the train station a few days before, back when I still had a shred of naïveté left to cling to and the ability to pretend I could be at least marginally normal, I dragged my feet a bit. Noticing this, Mrs. Lupin let the boys go on ahead while she hung back to ask, “Are you all right, Anna?”

I hadn’t been all right for so long I had just about forgotten what it felt like. But that was a discussion I didn’t want to get into with Mrs. Lupin, so I just said, “I’m fine.” But of course Mrs. Lupin didn’t believe it. “Really, I am. I was just thinking about all the homework I’ve got, is all. A four foot essay in History of Magic, two and a half feet in Charms, three in Defense Against the Dark Arts, and don’t even get me started on all I’ve got to do in Potions! Oh, well, at least it gives me something to do with my life.”

Shaking her head, Mrs. Lupin said, “You really do worry me sometimes, Anna.” I didn’t answer her, focusing on the boys laughing and talking several yards ahead. “Are you sure there’s nothing else bothering you?”

“Even if there was – and there isn’t – it wouldn’t be any of your business,” I snapped. Plus, she already knew what was wrong. She’d known for years, since I first met Charlie. And that really irritated me, because I couldn’t be sure if she actually cared about me like I’d always thought or if she was just pretending in order to keep an eye on me and make sure I didn’t snap.

“All right, all right,” said Mrs. Lupin. “I’m sorry I asked. Just…please know that if there is ever anything – anything at all – you want to talk about, you can always come to me.”

“Okay, thanks,” I said blandly, and then didn’t talk any more to her for the rest of the walk.


	13. In Which Life Comes (Almost) Full Circle

To officially prove that we were all back and all okay, Mrs. Lupin took us to Professor McGonagall’s office. “Finally! I’d almost become convinced that the Auror Office had decided that doing what it’s supposed to wasn’t worth anyone’s time!” the headmistress exclaimed when she saw us, prompting Mrs. Lupin to begin profusely apologizing.

“I’m so sorry no one did anything about the situation earlier. These kids should have been back here days ago. There’s really no excuse for why that didn’t happen.” It wasn’t too long before the apology became more of a tirade. “The Department of Magical Law Enforcement has made several excuses, of course, mostly relating to documentation issues or some other ridiculous bureaucratic stuff, but frankly none of them are at all convincing. I know I work for them, but I have absolutely no problem criticizing how inefficient they are – it’s absolutely maddening that this case just sat around on someone’s desk for three whole days!”

“Yes, well, at least despite that these three are all right,” said McGonagall. “Speaking of which, you kids can go on back to your dorms; I’ll just have Tonks – Mrs. Lupin – fill me in on her investigation.” I, personally, was relieved that we didn’t have to go through our stories for a third time so I and Stevie and Scorpius were finally free to do our thing (so long as that thing was all of the homework we had).

As we left the headmistress’s office, I wondered if she and the other teachers had any idea about the connections between me and Stevie and the Malfoys, or if that’s what Mrs. Lupin was telling her, or what. Over the next few weeks I became rather obsessed with looking for signals in all of my classes of whether or not the teachers knew I was Bellatrix, like a habit of not looking straight at me except for little sideways glances when they thought I wouldn’t notice. They probably all did have some idea, I decided; some (McGonagall) were just better at hiding it than others (Snape).

Since the Ravenclaw and Slytherin dorms are on opposite sides of the castle from each other my path split off from the boys’ not long after leaving McGonagall’s office; they went right while I went left. “See you around, Anna!” said Scorpius cheerfully when we reached the point where we had to start taking different hallways. I responded with, “See you,” and shared a significant look of uncertain meaning with Stevie (my interpretation of it was something along the lines of “I suppose it’s only fair that we have each other’s backs from now on considering the circumstances, but I still don’t like you much,” but I could have been wrong) before going on my way up six flights of winding stairs to Ravenclaw Tower.

The common room was full of the hushed energy of students going about their daily business; homework, chatting with friends, and that sort of thing, but everyone went dead silent when they realized I was in the room. A boy by the fireplace handed his friend a Galleon, no doubt as part of a bet they’d made regarding when I’d end up coming back. “Did you miss me?” I asked, rather facetiously. 

Several people rolled their eyes at that. The ever-blunt Jessamine Jacobs, who’s in my year and is the most vocal person in Ravenclaw regarding how tragically mis-sorted I am, scoffed, “No. Not at all. I personally liked having you not here.” I really hated her.

“Well, that’s good, because I didn’t miss you at all either, Jess,” I shot back. “It’s kind of sad, isn’t it, how I didn’t actually mind being kidnapped because at least I didn’t have to put up with you going on and on about how I don’t belong here and never have and never will? I think everyone’s got the message by now. You can stop running your smart little mudblood mouth about it, trying to feel useful by telling people things they’ve heard a hundred times before.”

Pretty much everyone in the room gasped when I said that. “How rude!” Jess exclaimed, pulling a scandalized face that made her look exactly like a pouty tattle-tale three year old (it was the braided pigtails she was wearing that really cemented the effect, I think). “Take that back, Anna!”

“I’ll take it back only when you take back all of the things you’ve said about me!” in other words, never.

“I can’t take anything back if it’s true!” Jess taunted, still wearing that ridiculous pout of hers. “And it all is and you know it!”

“So is what I said.” I said with a smirk, looking her right in the eyes. The way she reacted, you’d think I slapped her. She tried to come up with a clever retort, but just ended up making a pathetic squeaking noise and stomping away to the bathroom, her face bright red with shame – her usually sharp wit had failed her at a very inopportune time and she was absolutely mortified. Or maybe she realized that whatever she said I’d just throw back in her face and she’d never get anywhere. Either way, I was satisfied with having had the last word, so much so that I practically skipped up the stairs to the girls’ dorm, where I was delighted to find that Narcissa had kept her promise and mailed me everything she’d bought for me, including the miraculous leave-in conditioner.

All things considered, things went pretty smoothly for me for the next few days. Most of that had to do with the fact that I was too busy with all of my homework to be very lonely or bored, and with my decision to not trouble myself with the opinions of all the petty idiots in my life (aka everyone but Charlie). I did my best to ignore people, shot off witty comebacks and insults if necessary, and above all endeavored to project that I was above whatever drama they were trying to create. Every time they described me as weird, I told myself that really meant I was extraordinary and they were just jealous. After a couple dozen repeats, I almost believed what I was saying. 

I couldn’t ever actually believe it because…well, there was no denying that there was quite a lot of weirdness about me. Finally accepting the truth of where I’d come from somehow caused Bellatrix’s already frighteningly vivid memories of Death Eatery to ratchet up to an entirely different level of intensity in my dreams. Not only did I finally know the name of almost everyone in the battle in the Department of Mysteries – even the handful of Death Eaters whose faces were never seen – and understand the meaning of nearly everything I saw and heard, but there was a terrifyingly elevated level of feeling. Not only triumph, but panic and annoyance and determination, waves of such intense emotion that the dream felt as real as if it were happening right then.

The abnormal lucidity of the dream made waking up incredibly disorienting; half of my mind was still stuck in the memory, so it took a few minutes every time I had it for me to remember who I was, where I was, and why. The result of this was that on my first night back at school, I apparently threatened to violently murder every single one of the other Ravenclaw fourth-year girls. Jess, purely out of annoyance, did the sensible thing and slapped me across the face to jolt me fully awake, but – and this is the worst part – I didn’t have any awareness of what I’d just been shouting at her and everyone else.

Waverly Keating was bawling when I came to; all the other girls were just about petrified with fright. “What is wrong with you?” Violet Perry squeaked.

The phrase that first came to my mind was “way too much.” Apparently there was still a part of my mind that still belonged to Bella, surfacing in the middle of the night when my defenses were down. To say that might cause problems for me was the understatement of the century. “It was just a nightmare. Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“You said you’d cut my tongue off if I didn’t zip it,” Jess deadpanned. “And then gouge out my heart with a spoon. I think that’s definitely worth worrying about, Anna.” Around her, the other girls murmured assent. “You’ve got to do something.”

“Yeah, well, sorry about that but believe it or not I actually can’t control what I say when I’m asleep, Jess,” I snapped. “There’s nothing I can do. Just…start wearing earplugs or something.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” said Violet. And then she put a silence charm on me and “forgot” to take it off in the morning; she and all of my other housemates actually more or less pretended I didn’t exist since they couldn’t hear me. I went that entire day unable to speak, which wasn’t quite as awful as it sounds because I had nobody to really talk to anyway so I barely noticed. Still, I was pretty ticked at Violet.

It actually wasn’t till the afternoon, when I ran into Stevie in the hall, that I got the charm lifted. And then of course I had to explain to him what had happened. As the one person I knew who’d had nearly as odd a life as I had, I felt like he was the one person I could actually confide in regarding that sort of thing. I’d even go so far as to say I began to consider him and Scorpius my friends (which didn’t make him stop mocking me, however). “Well, that’s kind of unfortunate,” he said when I’d finished telling him my story. “Seeing as someone had to put a spell on you to keep you quiet, I’m guessing you have no idea how to make it stop?”

I shook my head. “Not unless you have any ideas.” He didn’t. “Okay, then, I guess I’m just doomed to keep the reputation of school psycho,” I said. Maybe it wouldn’t be a terrible gig. There had to be some way to use that to gain at least a little more respect from people. I supposed I’d figure it out eventually, as well as (hopefully) some way to control my aggressive sleep-talking so I could stop having to let my housemates take turns silencing me each night so everyone could actually sleep. They actually took a rather perverse pleasure in it, and worked out a complex system of points to determine who got the right to do the spell each night based on who I’d annoyed most recently. At least, they claimed it was complex. From my point of view it seemed completely arbitrary, little better than rock-paper-scissors.

I never had much of a chance to work out exactly how to scare people into respecting me before Charlie and everyone else who’d gone home for the week returned. She sought me out almost immediately after arriving, running up to embrace me as I walked obliviously down the hallway in the direction of the library and exclaiming, “Anna! It’s so great to see you again – I really missed you!”

“I missed you too,” I said, returning the hug even though I’ve always hated hugging. It was that sort of a reunion.

“So, my mum said you had a bit of an adventure earlier this week – I’d love to hear all about it,” Charlie said. “That is, if you’re comfortable talking about it. And it totally understand if you aren’t. Mum said you were really shaken up. You do look kind of…I don’t know. Different.” After studying me for a few seconds, she hit on the most obvious thing I’d altered about myself. “Oh, did you change the way you did your hair? It looks nice.”

“Thanks. I’m trying a couple of new products. So far, so good,” I said, rather blandly. It was the only part of what she’d said that I could confidently comment on at the moment. Part of me wanted to tell her everything – absolutely everything – about my little “adventure,” as she called it (her family does have a knack for euphemisms – I’ve heard her dad’s condition referred to as a “furry little problem” on a few occasions). Another part wanted to play it safe and prevent her from ever finding out I was Bellatrix. She seemed like too kind a person to hate me for it, but if it turned out she wasn’t, she had over ten years of dirt on me. And I didn’t want to think about how bad things could get in that case.

Charlie must have assumed I’d give her all the details of my week, or was secretly determined to get the info out of me no matter what, because she started right in asking me questions. “Did you find some clue about your birth parents while you were at the Malfoys or something? I know you thought they might have been Death Eaters – were they?”

“No, but they were…um, supporters.” Which was true. Bella’s parents had fully agreed with the Death Eaters’ general philosophy of hating mudbloods and other “undesirables.”

“So that means you found out who they were?” I nodded. “That’s great! Well, I mean, not so great that they were snotty purebloods – they had to be if they supported Voldemort – but at least you don’t have that question hanging over you anymore!” No, instead I had something much worse. “Is there something else wrong, Anna? You look distressed.”

I fully intended to tell her I was fine, just like I’d told her mother. But instead I found myself taking a risk and saying, “Charlie, I…I found out something more. It’s kind of weird. Okay, it’s really weird. But I swear I didn’t make any of it up. Believe me, I’d rather it wasn’t true.” I just had to know how she’d react to the truth; I didn’t think I could stay friends with her if she couldn’t handle it.

Concernedly, Charlie asked, “What is it?”

I sucked in a deep breath, then pulled her into a closet and locked the door for good measure before letting loose with a rather rambling, oblique summary of my darkest secret. “Just over fifteen years ago, someone – a friend of your mum’s actually, and her husband – invented a potion that could turn people back into babies. Someone, and no one’s sure who, stole a few samples and used them on a couple of ex-Death Eaters. I’m one of the…er, results of that. Stevie’s another. Not sure if there are more of us.”

The look on Charlie’s face upon hearing that was a somewhat even blend of confusion and surprise. “So what does that mean?”

“It means that up until about fifteen years and two weeks ago Stevie was Lucius Malfoy and I was Bellatrix Lestrange.” Saying that phrase actually got easier every time. Charlie’s eyes widened but she said nothing so I went on. “Terrifying, isn’t it? It gets worse. As it turns out, she was your grandmum’s older sister – although your grandmum would probably never acknowledge that even if her life depended on it because…well, who’d want to admit they were related to someone like that? – which means technically I’m your great-aunt. Oh, and also just for the record you and Scorpius Malfoy are second cousins. His grandmum is your grandmum’s little sister but the two of them haven’t spoken in about forty years because your grandmum decided she didn’t believe that being a pureblood made her better than anyone else so she ran away from home and married a poor muggle-born.”

“Is this some kind of prank, Anna?” asked Charlie skeptically

I wished I could say yes, but I’d come too far to back down and lie to her. “I look exactly like Bellatrix did when she was young, my birthday is the same as the day she supposedly died, there are no records of me actually being born fifteen years ago, and plus I kind of…um, have a couple of her memories.” That took some guts to say.

Charlie went back to looking confused. “You’ve got her memories?”

“In the form of scarily vivid dreams of murder and torture, yep,” I said. “It scares all of my housemates out of their wits. And they’re freaky specific, too – I would seriously bet money that if I told it to you, you’d be able to go to the library, look up decisive events in the war, and find an account that matched it exactly. And the people I hurt in the dream would match with descriptions of people Bellatrix hurt in the battle. Don’t believe me? We could always test it out. But what reason would I have to lie about this? It’s kind of life-ruining information, if you think about it.”

It took several seconds for Charlie to fully absorb that news, but eventually she said, looking rather dazed, “Okay….yeah. That is pretty weird, Anna, but…”

“Are you sure you still want to be friends with me now? You’re sure I don’t disgust you?”

“Anna, you’re…nuts. You really are,” said Charlie, shaking her head.

“I knew it!” I shrieked. “I just knew you wouldn’t like me anymore if I told you!”

“Calm down a moment, would you? You’re nuts…to think I’d do something like that. Of course I still want to be your friend, Anna!” Charlie declared. And then she hugged me again. Still a bit steamed, I didn’t exactly appreciate the violation of personal space…but it was only a mild annoyance in the face of the revelation that my best and only friend wasn’t completely repulsed by finding out I was Bellatrix. “That past has nothing to do with your future. It’s barely worse than learning that one of your parents did something awful. You just put it behind you and choose for yourself what you’re going to be like. And I know you can be a good person.”

Though I appreciated the vote of confidence, I was still pretty sure my future looked very bleak indeed. Oh, well. I figured I still had at least a few good years left. “You’re the best, Charlie. I don’t know what I’d ever do without you.” And I really did mean it; without a great friend like Charlie, I’d have been doomed for sure. “We’re lucky we met as little kids and got to know and like each other so well before we found out we technically come from two different worlds.”

“Where you come from doesn’t matter to me,” Charlie said decisively. “And plus we’re family, right?”

“Yeah, I guess we are.” Funny, to think I’d found members of my real family – albeit not very close ones – so early on and never knew it. “But if you ever tell anyone you found out I’m related to you, please just say I’m your cousin or something.” Not that anyone would take it at all seriously if she said what I really was.

Charlie nodded. “I was going to, otherwise it’d be weird.”

We spent a lot of time that afternoon and evening just talking and catching up on each other’s lives. Charlie filled me in on the details of her brother’s proposal (everything went as planned, except Vic’s French grandparents seemed a little uncomfortable with the fact that Teddy has bright blue hair) and I told her a bit more about my stay with the Malfoys. The subject of me being Bellatrix was by unspoken agreement not directly touched on again; I think she still found it a bit hard to believe and was looking, as I had at first, for clues whether or not it could actually be true. For my part, I was looking for clues that she might be more uncomfortable with the news than she wanted to admit. I think we both found what we were looking for.

Sweetie that she is, Charlie made a point after dinner to seek out Scorpius in the library where he and Stevie were working on homework together and say, “Hey, I just found out we’re related, so…welcome to the family. You know, I’ve always wondered what it would be like having a cousin. Now I guess I can find out!”

Before Scorpius could say anything in response to that, Stevie cut in with, “Really, Charlotte? You’re a filthy half-breed freak; what makes you think we’d ever be caught dead publicly calling you family?” The “half-breed freak” bit was a reference to Charlie’s father being what many would consider sub-human, making his kids rather undesirable company in certain circles. Especially the circles Stevie wanted to run in, but even people who don’t believe in classifying people based on blood status are typically leery of families like the Lupins. I would be too if I hadn’t met them when I was only four.

“Excuse me, Stevie, but I wasn’t talking to you,” Charlie said icily. She then turned back to Scorpius “You’ve got a mind and a mouth of your own – why don’t you use them and start thinking and speaking for yourself instead of always letting him do it?”

Scorpius said nothing and just stared down at the textbook in front of him, which I could tell really disappointed Charlie. It would have meant an awful lot to her if she had managed to get a Malfoy to ignore his family’s judgmental attitudes and accept her offer of cousin-ship. “He’s just shy. Don’t worry about it,” I told her as we left. Even though I was pretty sure he probably wouldn’t have been all that willing to admit he’s related to Charlie even if Stevie didn’t basically forbid him from it. Even though he’s the most open-minded pureblood I’ve ever met, he doesn’t like making waves, and to start calling someone like Charlotte Lupin his cousin or would be making some very big ones.

Looking back wistfully at the boys, Charlie said, “I feel kind of sorry for him. Stevie doesn’t even give him a chance, to have his own opinions. It’s sad, isn’t it?”

“Miserable,” I agreed. “But you know, so is the fact that Stevie’s only real shot at relevance is to have Scorpius depending on him to orchestrate his whole life. Without each other, I really do think they’d both be nobodies. The shy boy from a suspicious family and the adopted dreamer with virtually no past and no good way of getting ahead in life. They need each other. Badly.”

“But Stevie…”

“Is Scorpius’ fake brother and real best friend. Don’t flatter yourself thinking that you could ever talk them out of that relationship, even if it is slightly unhealthy. And – please know I’m saying this as a friend, so don’t get mad at me – there’s seriously no way you’ll ever get either of them to claim relation to you. Scorpius is just too polite to admit it. You and your whole family make him nervous.” Okay, maybe I don’t know that last bit for sure, but it was a very reasonable guess. I just didn’t want Charlie getting her hopes up that Scorpius might see her a little differently than Stevie and pressing the issue. She’d just embarrass herself, most likely. Or worse.

No matter how many times she heard that someone was uncomfortable with her family (and in fifteen years she’d heard it many, many times), Charlie was still saddened by it. “Are you sure that’s what he thinks, Anna? Or are you just saying that because you think it’s be weird if he didn’t?”

“Does it matter? Even on the off chance that Scorpius didn’t really agree with Stevie about you – and it is a very off chance – he’d never go against Stevie on it because if he did, Stevie would tell Scorpius’ parents and then the whole Malfoy family would have a major freak-out and I’d inevitably get pulled into it because I’m the one who told you that you were related to Scorpius and it just wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone. Got it?”

Charlie sighed. “All right, I got it. You just don’t want to deal with the possibility that telling me that my family and the Malfoys are technically related might backfire on you, even though because of Stevie there probably isn’t one.”

“Precisely. I’m so glad we understand each other.” At least sort of. Which is really all I could ask for given the circumstances. I didn’t even quite understand myself anymore, so I couldn’t expect anyone else to. Luckily I understood just enough to get by, because the next day, classes resumed and I had my first encounter with James since being kidnapped. After taking an entire week off of his favorite pastime and discovering to his horror that, thanks to my efforts to stop caring what everyone thought of me, blind harassment of Anna Doyle was not quite as rampant as when he had left, he redoubled his efforts to debase me. He found me in the courtyard just after lunch doing some last-minute reading for Charms, alone (Charlie had been with me, but had left to go to the toilets about two minutes before James showed up) and apparently defenseless, and snuck up behind me. “Hey, freak. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” he asked, sneering.

“Go away, James. I’m in a good mood today and I’d hate for you to go ruining it.” I was somewhat surprised to find that I was no longer afraid of him. His schoolyard mockery, which used to fill me with dread at the possibility that he might be more right about me than I wanted to think, now fell short precisely because it turned out he was totally right but still didn’t know the half of it.

James snorted. “I don’t take instructions from psycho losers like you, Annabell.” Jumping straight to his favorite insult meant that he was desperate to get a reaction out of me. I’d give him a reaction, all right. Just not the one he wanted.

“What did you just call me?” I asked blithely. “I didn’t catch that.” James narrowed his eyes, not pleased with being talked back to, and ripped the book out of my hands.

“I said, you’re a psycho loser,” he said loudly so everyone in the courtyard could hear, basking in his own perceived awesomeness. Unfortunately for him, I was done feeding the perception by being insulted by his words, which were actually kind of pathetic as far as insults go. I was done letting myself be a victim. James would have to get his ego trips from antagonizing someone else, because targeting me was not going to turn out very well for him. 

“Give the book back or else, Potter,” I demanded.

With a nasty smirk, James held it up out of my reach and issued a public challenge: “Why don’t you make me?”

I stood up to face him, smiling because he’d made my next move all too easy. “All right, if you insist.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Stevie nod almost imperceptibly; he knew James was going to get it. Slowly, almost lazily, I raised my wand till it was pointed directly at the smug face of my adversary. “Tarantallegra!” I shouted. Immediately, James broke out into violently uncontrollable dancing and general flailing around (unfortunately he retained a fast grip on the book) while I laughed at how ridiculous he looked, as did Stevie and a handful of others in the crowd. Most everyone else just stared in shock.

“This isn’t funny!” he yelled. “Make it stop, Anna! Make it stop!” So much whining over a spell that technically caused no pain, no injury whatsoever. He wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds if I’d used a stronger curse. His father should be ashamed.

I let him thrash about for about a minute longer before pronouncing the counter-jinx, just as I saw Charlie coming back into the courtyard (sort of because she was coming back, actually; I didn’t want her jumping in and ruining the moment by telling me off in front of everybody). “That, Potter, was just a taster,” I told James after releasing him to collapse in a dazed heap on the ground, my wand still pointed at is head. “Now, either give that book back or I’ll hit you with something that I can assure you will leave you in the hospital wing crying for your mother.”

Without hesitation, James threw the book down at my feet and stormed away, utterly humiliated. Watching him go, I was almost giddy with triumph. Finally, I’d given James Potter what he deserved. I knew it was far from over between the two of us – he’d continue messing with me for a long time yet – but I swore to myself I’d make him wish he’d given up and left me alone when he had the chance. Whatever it took, I’d do it. I’d make everyone fear me enough to give me the respect I deserved. Nothing could stop me now. I was at the beginning of something completely new, a whole different life, and it felt terrific.

**Author's Note:**

> story inspiration in a nutshell: What if Bellatrix got turned back into a kid and raised by normal middle-class people, but then found out who she used to be?


End file.
